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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25991470">Looking for Carol: A Travel Diary in Uncharted Territory</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefrenchlady/pseuds/thefrenchlady'>thefrenchlady</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Carol (2015), The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, Gen, Love at First Sight, Reviews</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 02:31:51</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>24,260</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25991470</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefrenchlady/pseuds/thefrenchlady</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A non fiction account of my personal journey exploring the world of Carol and how it changed my life. In it, I discuss reactions to the movie and works on this fandom. This is my own way of showing appreciation to a fandom that has given me so much. English is not my first language, so please excuse any errors.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Carol Aird &amp; Therese Belivet, Carol Aird/Therese Belivet</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>369</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>92</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Love at First Sight</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This little adventure could not have been possible without two friends I want to thank here. SimplySally, you pushed me to give a try, you helped me to "squeeze the lemon" and find my way with English words, and you are always here when I need assistance. Pentimento, you encouraged me for four years, you gave me support and advice. I thank both of you for your friendship. You are the best editors ever. You have all my gratitude.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I like to go far. I like to travel. I like the change of scenery and even the disorienting feeling of jet lag. And most of all, I like the awakening jolt it provides. </p><p>Yet for all my travels, nothing could prepare me for this journey. No baggage could be packed, for I had no idea what I was about to encounter. A photo led me to a film, this film to a novel, this novel to other fictions, to authors, to readers, and to other worlds.  And so, my hand resting on invisible threads; like Theseus in the labyrinth, I walked blindly, tirelessly, greedily, and these entangled threads guided me in the most unexpected of journeys.</p><p>Dear reader who has ventured into my scribbles, this is not a fiction that I am about to tell you. This is not a new version of Carol and Therese. It is the story of a film that turned my life upside down and transported me on a journey that still continues to amaze and feed me today. I share with you the tale of how I met Carol and where she led me.   </p><p>                       _________________________________________________________________</p><p>Before starting I will have to tell a little about myself on a personal level. I don’t like it. It scares me, but I will do it.</p><p>I will begin by saying that I am probably one of the only straight women on this specific fandom. </p><p>That's it, it is said. Thefrenchlady has just come out of the closet. For the first time in my life, I am the minority, an odd situation that nothing has prepared me to live. And I'm experiencing the fear of rejection. It is only fair, after all.</p><p>I hope I don't make anyone uncomfortable by saying this, knowing that most of the readers here are lesbians. My favorite authors are, too (at least two of them who know the real, flesh and blood Thefrenchlady). And for good reason: they are fans of <strong><em>Carol</em></strong> and <strong><em>The Price of Salt</em></strong>, film and cult novel of lesbian culture. Until 2016, I had no idea. I didn't even think there could be a lesbian or gay culture. I apologize now humbly because my ignorance at the time is proof among others that belonging to a so-called "dominant" model (white, straight, bourgeois) makes you completely indifferent to what can exist outside of this "standard.” Any other form of culture is therefore nullified. It is a terrible observation that I make to myself, and it makes me deeply mortified. </p><p>Since then I have tried to change. <strong><em>Carol</em></strong> helped me.</p><p>Some additional details may help you to better understand what will follow. I am married (for 28 years!) to the most charming of boys. We have a son and a daughter, now grown up. I teach classical letters in middle and high school.  </p><p>                      _______________________________________________________________<br/><br/></p><p>Chapter 1.         Love at First Sight</p><p> </p><p>The Picture</p><p>One day at the beginning of 2016, I was browsing Télérama, a French cultural weekly popular with teachers, when I came across a stunning picture: two women in a backdrop of the 50s. One, brunette, was sitting at the piano. The other, blonde, dressed in a blue dress, was standing behind her, majestic and serious, gently grazing her back. I identified Cate Blanchett right away. I had seen her in some films, among others <strong><em>Blue Jasmine</em></strong>, which had strongly moved me. I did not recognize the young brunette actress at first. It was indeed difficult to recognize Lisbeth Salander in the young and delicate girl in the picture. </p><p>In itself, this picture was already stunning. The photographer had captured a significant moment: one of the women is young and seated. The other is more mature and is standing. The girl is dressed in dark and ordinary clothes. In contrast, the blonde woman wears an elegant dress which outlines a magnificently feminine body. There is a large gold bracelet around her wrist. We can feel an imperceptible gap, the age and no doubt the social status, accentuated by the opposition between the sitting and the standing position. Above all, the woman is touching the younger woman. She initiates the gesture. The girl is touched, she receives it. </p><p>Another striking detail: their gazes. The girl lowers her eyes, struck with stupor. The older woman’s eyes are serious, also lowered. We feel that something has just happened that should not have happened, the uncontrollable attraction which led to physical contact.</p><p>An implicit tension emerges from this shot, gravity and sensuality too. Of course, one does not analyze this at first glance, but the eye catches everything all at once, intuitively. Just with this picture, with an absolute certainty, I knew at first sight I was going to love this movie.</p><p>The article headlined: <strong><em>Far from heaven but close to perfection</em></strong>. The reference was obvious. The filmmaker was Todd Haynes, whose movie <strong><em>Far from Heaven</em></strong> with the great Julianne Moore I had loved. I read the quick summary, and these few lines were enough to convince me that I would be captivated. As in <strong><em>Far from Heaven</em></strong>, it was a love story made impossible by a corseted society, a subject both romantic and sociological. I left the reading of the long review for later, as I often do. I wanted to avoid any influence before I could experience for myself what the movie would do to me. The sumptuous beauty of the picture alone already told me that this was going to be great.</p><p>And this is how, on a Saturday evening in January 2016, I found myself on the way to the movie theater of my small town with my husband and my daughter – but only after verifying that the movie would be screened in its original version.</p><p> </p><p>The Movie</p><p>Going to the cinema on a Saturday evening in the French provinces is a slice of local life, a sociological tasting I highly recommend to tourists who happen to get lost in my area. My little town is a picturesque French postcard: you will see bell towers, an open-air market smelling of waffles and French fries, cafes under arcades where people drink beer, a belfry playing a chime every quarter of an hour, and two magnificent squares inherited from the Spanish occupation in the north of France. Here beats the very heart of the place. </p><p>A proper and small bourgeois world flourishes here beginning with Friday evening Happy Hour, a trend we learned from Paris. The weekend evenings are always lively. A whole population loosens up in the bars and restaurants along the squares. Among this joyful fauna already tipsy by 7pm, you will see some hurried walkers making their way. They are not that young, some you might even call old. Others are middle-aged. These are the moviegoers, a sort of sect that I call my own.</p><p>And I will leave it to your imagination which category I belong to.</p><p>Over the years, their number has grown. My small town takes pride in a European film festival whose fame has been built up over time. A certain infatuation for the 7th art has spread, which reaches its peak each fall at the time of our festival. The rest of the time, this picky audience has to settle for the sporadic release of art and essay films, in an antiquated cinema with incongruous schedules. Priority is always given to large commercial films. This is the rule.</p><p>It was, therefore, quite a miracle that Carol found her way, on a chilly January evening, in a small northern town, to this handful of provincial cinephiles.</p><p>The movie theater is a survivor dating back before the multiplexes. There are still some found in the provinces, as well as in Paris. These often outdated and poorly- lit places are historic. You sit in soft, wobbly armchairs, in small screening rooms. It's either hot or very cold. Local ads are played at such a high volume that it twists your ears. But you can book your ticket online, buy popcorn and a Coke, and when the lights go out, you can still smell in the air a dusty scent of nostalgia. You can almost see the ghost of the ancient usher who showed you to your seat with her flashlight in hand, or the lady selling ice cream in her large rectangular basket. It is a journey down memory lane. </p><p>Could there be another place to watch <strong><em>Carol</em></strong>?</p><p>There was a small crowd in the movie theater that evening. The faces were familiar, even if the names were unknown. Without ever talking together, we recognized each other, members of the little sect of original version maniacs, diligent readers of Télérama, film festival fans from the start. </p><p>In the queue to buy the tickets, a person’s ear might catch snatches of conversations: </p><p>"Have you read the article in Le Monde?” </p><p>"Rooney Mara, isn't she the tattooed girl in that Norwegian thriller, Lisbeth something?" </p><p>"Ah, Far from Paradise, the deep south ... It reminds me when we went to New Orleans. Do you remember darling, the giant crab we had in that little restaurant? What was the name again?” </p><p>" Hi, lovely, so you came after all?”</p><p>" Well, I still have a bunch of schoolwork to grade, but I said I'm tired! Tonight I'm taking a break – Shit, it's Saturday! </p><p>A note for possible American readers: a French conversation will always involve memories of food and cinema. Some politics. Maybe a little sex. Well, not always, and not necessarily always in that order.</p><p>Yes, indeed, we were mostly from the same tribe, a crowd of teachers, many already retired. But some were like me, procrastinating, aware that on a corner of their desk at home remained ungraded schoolwork, whose bewitched stack seems to eternally reconstitute itself even when you think you are done editing it.</p><p>Teaching: Sisyphus' Rock or Danaides' Barrel.</p><p>I settled in a fairly uncrowded screening room between my husband and my daughter. The impatience to discover this film whose sublime photo had touched me was coupled with this delicious feeling of guilt that comes to the habitual procrastinator. The pleasure to come is increased with this knowledge. </p><p>Darkness fell, rumor faded. I stopped breathing.</p><p>Trying to describe what happened to me next is like explaining a thunderbolt, or how at first glance one is caught, captivated, and transported beyond oneself. From the first images, this long sequence shot which begins with the motif, initially indecipherable, of a metro grid. (Oh, the name Carol superimposed on this grid's motif, which already announces all that will restrain and enclose the heroine!) From the opening onward, I only had to follow the slow and smooth motion of the camera, which was widening and leading me from a NYC street inside a luxury hotel's bar.</p><p>Then I don't remember anything. I mean, I got into the story so intensely that everything around me disappeared. This spell - what other name could be given? - is the conjunction of several things that make a film: the scenario, the actors, the camera, the light, the music ... I do not intend to analyze it; others more talented have already done so. Anyway, what I experienced while watching Carol cannot be simply reduced to an analysis. It would be like trying to analyze love at first sight as a mere process of brain chemistry and techniques, which undoubtedly offers very scientific lighting but tends to strip everything of its magic. And magic it was. </p><p>In Woody Allen's <strong><em>The Purple Rose of Cairo</em></strong>, the heroine is so fascinated by the film she is watching that she enters the film itself. I think that's what literally happened to me that day. Not only did I get into the screen, but I merged into the movie. And I became Therese. I’ve never experienced so intensely in cinema the power of the gaze and the way, through the cameras, the spectator can find herself in the skin of a character. It's a filmmaker's "trick", I am aware, and this consciousness actually introduces a slight distance between what I see and myself (<em>I understood that the filmmaker wanted me to see through his character's eyes</em>). That day, I did not question the process. I let it happen, and I forgot it… And that's how I fell in love at first sight with a statuesque woman in a fur coat, a majestic blonde creature, whose lost gaze and trembling hands betrayed an inner chaos. A goddess and a woman. Carol. This poignant image entered my soul forever.</p><p> </p><p>Anyone in the screening room can see the outline in the darkness of a medium-sized woman seated between a broad-bodied man and a long, slender girl. This woman is leaning forward, her body stretched toward the screen, her gaze intensely fixed on it. But it's just an illusion, it's an empty envelope: this woman is no longer there. When the film is finished and the lights come back on, this man and this young girl will discover the disappearance. The local press will headline tomorrow: Inexplicable missing, a woman enraptured in a movie. </p><p>How many of us have thus been enraptured? How many of us have blended into <strong><em>Carol,</em></strong> have become part of it, and the film part of them? How many people are still missing?</p><p>At the end of the film, inevitably, I will return to reality. But right now it's impossible. I don't want to. I cannot! Leave me! </p><p>I am the glances, all of them: the fascinated look of a young girl on a gorgeous blonde, the intense stolen gaze of a woman on a gracious brunette crossing a street. </p><p>I am the voices: Billie Holiday singing Easy Living, a husky voice saying, "Ask me things." </p><p>I am the gestures: lips voluptuously taking a drag on a cigarette, the curvaceous writing of a name on a notebook and the hand which writes it, a shoulder lightly caressed by a hand. </p><p>I am the melancholy and familiar scenery of an Edward Hopper painting: two women in a sad diner, a gray beautiful America through the window of a car, a woman in red in front of a store window. </p><p>I am the promise of a trip (where? when?), the American road, motels, morning coffee always slightly bitter. </p><p>I am the trembling desire, the abandon at last. And forever, I am the innocence of the first time.</p><p>And then I am the eyes of this girl stepping forward in an almost suspended motion. I can't breathe anymore. Her eyes seek, her eyes find. I am in agony. She goes on and goes on, heartbreakingly slowly. My heart has stopped beating. A blonde woman looks up, their gazes meet, their eyes mingle… </p><p>Carol.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Consequences of a Coup de Foudre</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Dear readers, your comments on the first chapter were amazing. I didn't expect such interest. I thank you immensely. Here we are on board for the next step of this journey. I hope you will enjoy it.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<ol>
<li><strong> Coup de Foudre vs Love at First Sight</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>I saw him, I blushed: I paled at the sight.</p>
<p>Pain swelled in my troubled heart outright.</p>
<p>My eyes saw nothing, I couldn’t speak for pain.</p>
<p>I felt my whole body frozen, and in flame.</p>
<p>Jean Racine, <em>Phèdre</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>When I described what happened to me during the screening of<em> Carol</em>, I used the French expression "coup de foudre" (lightning bolt). This is a very common expression in my language, which can reference all kinds of objects: I may have a "coup de foudre" for a garment or a place, but also for a person. As I don’t consider a garment, a place or a person at the same level, I should specify that when used about a person, this is a lightning bolt of love. English speakers would commonly use the expression "love at first sight." In French-speaking culture, love passion is expressed through a meteorological metaphor: the onset of the feeling of love is like an electric shock with potentially devastating effects. Always impetuous, violent, exaggerated: this is passion. In Anglo-Saxon culture, this equally-impetuous passion is expressed by what characterizes its occurrence in us, the gaze. The phenomenon is not considered from the same angle, and not at the same time.</p>
<p>I love these confrontations between languages, which reveal our different perspectives on mechanisms that are nevertheless universal.</p>
<p>I will say that if I loved <em>Carol</em> at first sight, her appearance in my life was also a <em>coup de foudre</em>. A lightning bolt is a mysterious phenomenon that shows us the limits of what we can explain. It is not rational. It causes us a deep amazement similar to the numbness produced by electricity. The French metaphor of "coup de foudre" is particularly powerful: an emotional and / or physical affinity occurs instantly between the person and the object she suddenly wants, a violent electric shock between two storm clouds - a shake that can cause physiological changes in the individual. Unwittingly, the victim of a lightning bolt is crossed by an electric current of such intensity that it spreads throughout the body, passing through the heart and causing physical symptoms and trauma.</p>
<p>When the lights turned on in the screening room after <em>Carol</em>, my heart was beating, my hands were shaking, my throat was tight, my eyes were full of tears, and I was unable to utter a single sound. I was in a real traumatic state.</p>
<p>I don't think I am alone in it. As we sometimes see cases of collective lightning bolts occurring, I think that this small community which is ours has undoubtedly experienced the same phenomenon. Carol collectively struck us down like a <em>coup de foudre</em>.</p>
<p>I thus found myself struck down by <em>Carol,</em> by beauty, by a powerful emotion whose waves echoed in me like the vibrations of a great tuning fork. Just as some victims of lightning strikes are left with the indelible mark of the electric shock on their bodies by the presence of enigmatic shapes and random patterns on the surface of their skin, my deep self forever bears the invisible mark of my <em>Carol coup de foudre</em>. I like to contemplate its fractal figures - our common seal, my dear fellows.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say, I don't like my first chapter. It has required a lot of work, and I still find it poorly constructed and awkward. Questioning myself about the difficulty I had in shaping it, I understood that the storytelling of a <em>coup de foudre</em> by the one who was struck by lightning is impossible. The person struck down is unable to describe her experience in such a dazed state, even four years later. But it doesn’t stop me from trying, for in relating my <em>Carol coup de foudre</em>, I can reconstruct forever the moment of my rapture, the instant of my wonder. It was one moment. It is over. Trying to write about it allows me to recreate it again and again. It is already a memory, yet still forever emblazoned in my mind.</p>
<p>I will never cease to be amazed to have had this chance, meeting <em>Carol</em>, meeting a story that spoke to my desires. Isn’t that the definition of a great love?</p>
<p> </p>
<ol>
<li><strong> My Sweet Sickness</strong></li>
</ol>
<p>- You are beautiful, Helena, so beautiful that looking at you is a suffering.</p>
<p>- Yesterday you said it was a joy.</p>
<p>- It is a joy and a suffering.</p>
<p>François Truffaut, <em>The Last Metro</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>We can fall in love with a film, with characters, and with a story that suddenly meets our deep self. Then, after the dazzling moment of the first encounter comes the moment of love, sweet sickness, painful joy, never-fulfilled desire, and obsession. Love is a disease - this is not a new topic, but it is always new for the one who falls in love.</p>
<p>I was in love with <em>Carol</em>. I succumbed to it completely and indulged in my delicious illness delightedly and shamelessly.</p>
<p>This illness brought with it side effects which were not inconsequential. I list some of them below, for my own amusement and hopefully yours, too.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong> <span class="u">Endless Questioning</span> </strong>
</p>
<p>I regained consciousness when the lights came on. I took a few moments to regain my senses. The film was over, and I felt like I was stopped in mid-flight. And after? And after? WHAT HAPPENS AFTER? It couldn't end just then, I wanted the next moment. What does Carol do when Therese arrives at her table? Does she get up? Does she throw herself into her arms? No, that’s unlikely, we’re in the Oak Room in the middle of other diners, in the fifties. How do you behave when you see the love of your life coming toward you, for whom you almost gave up being a mother, who you thought you had lost forever, and now she appears with an almost invisible smile and that angel face? This is a virtuoso ending! It’s not even an ending, it is almost an ending, just the moment before. Phyllis Nagy is truly an extraordinary screenwriter./ We are left just on the verge of something that the film will not reveal, for something that we madly hope, for something that we desperately desire… Carol and Therese together, a possible life for the two of them, a fairytale ending (they got married and had many children…).</p>
<p>Who didn't ask themselves these questions at the end of Carol? By asking the question here, I take little risk. We are all survivors of the Carol<em> coup de foudre</em> -- we all had the same symptoms, we all have the same consequences. Among these after-effects is the haunting question of the "after". Post Oak Room… everything is possible, everything remains to be imagined! I think today that this ending, or rather the possibility for many endings, is part of the fascination we have for this story. We are each left to imagine our own endings, spawning a fertile breeding ground for creativity, to imagine and re-imagine what could happen after that moment. And it is in the space left by this questioning that an obsession was born. It brought forth the amazing creativity expressed within this fandom.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong> <span class="u">Aphasia (Loss of Speech) </span> </strong>
</p>
<p>That night after the film, I walked back to the car not even feeling the bitter cold of a January night.</p>
<p>"Really nice film," said my husband.</p>
<p>“Oh, yes, I liked it,” added my daughter.</p>
<p><strong>Nice</strong> movie? I <strong>liked</strong> it? We had not seen the same film!</p>
<p>Sometimes the beings you love the most stab you with the most unconscious cruelties.</p>
<p>Our post-movies are usually animated. We talk about the film (I'm talkative), we chat (I always argue), we redo the film.</p>
<p>That evening I was speechless.</p>
<p>The emotion squeezed my throat and overwhelmed my mind so no coherent thought could form, words could not come out. My daughter asked me, "Are you ok, Mom?" surprised and incredulous to have her mother reduced to silence.  Could there still be room for any word?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong>
    <span class="u">Amnesia (Loss of Memory)</span>
  </strong>
</p>
<p>Night is a refuge, it brings oblivion.</p>
<p>In times of great grief, mornings are always painful. We come back to ourselves. We wake up, we remember: a loved one has passed away, the pain is searing, the day becomes gray. We must redo every morning in the path of sorrow.</p>
<p>The mornings after <em>Carol</em>’s screening, my awakenings were filled with intense happiness. My nocturnal oblivion was over, I remembered I was in love, and a glorious sun rose in my head. Every day I made my way back to<em> Carol</em>, and the morning sky of these dull January mornings was transformed in perpetual sunrise.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong>
    <span class="u">Volubility (The Talkative Phase)</span>
  </strong>
</p>
<p>After the aphasia comes the talkative phase, the liberated and liberating speech. We must speak, tell, explain, convince. Convert. How I would have liked to meet another person with my same illness. Together, we would have joined forces and expanded our new cult, Carol, to the whole world. But I was isolated, and my proselytism made few followers.</p>
<p>In this phase, no one is spared: family, colleagues, friends. The slightest conversation becomes a pretext for drifting towards the object of obsession:</p>
<p>"Have you seen <em>Carol</em>, with Cate Blanchett?"</p>
<p>And you are surprised by the round eyes of your butcher, confused: "Carol who? No, I don’t think so. Where does she live?"</p>
<p>Your loved ones are very patient. They love you, they have known you and have experienced you for a long time, some of them since they were born. They listen absently, they smile indulgently, looking at each other while nodding.</p>
<p>At this stage, the entourage still believes that this, too, shall pass.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong> <span class="u">Supernatural Phenomena: The Apparitions of Carol</span> </strong>
</p>
<p>My friend Win, a regular reader on this fandom and unconditional supporter of many authors, told me about the strange phenomena that appeared in her life after she too was bewitched by <em>Carol</em>. Cate Blanchett has appeared to her in multiple forms, her whole life seems to be connected to Cate by an invisible web of common dates and names. This is what she calls her "Cate’s Coincidences."</p>
<p>I like to hear these kinds of stories, or how after such an emotional shock, our whole universe seems to be filled with signs that allow us to project ourselves towards the object of our desire. I am a rational person, and I distrust the twilight zone. Yet I, too, have experienced a supernatural phenomenon.</p>
<p>Carol appeared to me.</p>
<p>Oh, not like the Virgin of Lourdes to Saint Bernadette. No, it was much more beautiful and much less publicized.</p>
<p>One early Saturday morning, I went to school for a meeting. My mood might not have been the best, because it is quite frustrating to feel you are the only one working at the start of the weekend, while everyone is still sleeping at home. My car entered the deserted city, crossing sleeping neighborhoods. Suddenly, a billboard caught my eye, then another, then another: dressed in a black jacket, hair untied, Carol was smiling at me. During the night, invisible hands had carried out a poster campaign for the perfume SÍ, by Giorgio Armani.</p>
<p>This is how, one early winter morning in a sleepy city, I found myself driving in sheer amazement, alone in the midst of a procession of Carols who were greeting me for the sole purpose of enchanting my dreary dawn.</p>
<p>Other people may not believe me, but I don’t care! The memory of my “vision” is enough in itself. And I know that you, my fellow Carol devotees, believe.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong> <span class="u">Fetishism?</span> </strong>
</p>
<p>The time comes when, to summon the loved object, the memory itself is no longer enough. There is longing, that desire made of deep aspiration and nostalgia. This delicate evil gnaws at you in silence, it feeds on its own lack, increases as you feed it. Carol was in my mind all the time.</p>
<p>I started collecting everything concerning the film. I bought Patricia Highsmith's novel. Freshly republished, it featured a photo of the film on its cover. I kept with jealous care the copy of Télérama which contained THE photo and the article which had started everything. It morphed into a sacred object.</p>
<p>I found the music CD…. It was like opening a bottle of perfume. From the first musical notes, like a strong and intoxicating breath, Carol was there: the characters, the intense images that had marked me, the melancholy light.  No sooner had I heard the first notes of “Easy Living,” I was transported to the President McKinley suite. “One Mint Julep” resuscitated the landscapes seen from the window of a car, and dazzled, I went up the stairs of the Drake Hotel in Chicago. As for Carter Burwell's melancholy clarinet and melody, it will forever bring me back to the little room in Waterloo. Music is such a powerful elixir for memory.</p>
<p>Then came the time for the DVD release. It was like the quest for the Holy Grail, the possession which would allow me to repeatedly summon the moment of my rapture. Magic resurrected.</p>
<p>Thus, my veneration was transferred to additional objects which again and again nourished my sweet sickness. I had become a fetishist, and <em>Carol</em> had become my innocent and familiar perversion.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong> <span class="u"> Misadventure and Adventure of a Fetishist</span> </strong>
</p>
<p>Two anecdotes come to mind to illustrate my sweet mania and its consequences.</p>
<p>
  <span class="u">Sí (The Misadventure)</span>
</p>
<p>My daughter and I are shopping together, looking for sales, and our steps lead us to a perfume store. Suddenly, in the midst of flashy stands, in a heavy atmosphere made of heady and discordant hints, my eye catches an image: queen Cate is sitting enthroned on a display, or rather her photo, for Sí by Giorgio Armani. My blood freezes, my heart stops beating. I rush to the stand, leaving my daughter flabbergasted.</p>
<p>She joins me, surprised. "I thought you had recognized someone," she says.</p>
<p><em>Indeed, I did</em>, I think.</p>
<p>"Look," I say, my voice trembling, “it's Cate's perfume!"</p>
<p>I immediately grab a piece of test paper and the demo bottle. I am ready to inhale the scent of Cate. This is the delicious scene at the McKinley Motel, and Billie Holiday's hoarse voice singing Easy Living. This is Therese and Carol having fun in the bedroom like two teenagers. This is Carol doing her makeup and perfuming Therese, then perfuming herself and saying, "Smell", and offering her arched neck...</p>
<p>Surely, Carol will come out all dressed in red from this perfume bottle like the genie from his lamp! With shaking hands I spray the precious elixir ...</p>
<p>The effect is instantaneous: nothing comes out of the bottle except an odor whose scents feel too rich and too sweet to me. The spell is broken.</p>
<p>"Don't buy that, Mom. Frankly, it's not you at all! I hate it! " My daughter is vehement, my disappointment indescribable.</p>
<p>Later, my friend SimplySally, to whom I will tell the anecdote, will laugh to tears and say to me, with her foolproof pragmatism: "Cate probably never wore this perfume either!"</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span class="u">Manifesto (The Adventure)</span>
</p>
<p>During the winter break - was it in 2017? - my husband and I spent a few days in Paris. Our plans included some exhibitions, theater, and undoubtedly a little shopping. Paris is beautiful all year round, but I especially love it at this time of year. The evening falls quickly, the cold is dry and sharp, the lights transfigure the city, there is a scent of roasted chestnuts - you feel like you have been flung out of time. Leafing randomly through a copy of L’Officiel des Spectacles, I suddenly stop: <em>Manifesto </em>by Julian Rosefeldt is being screened at the Beaux-Arts gallery! I've heard of this performance, but I never expected to see it screened in the provinces. And now I have the opportunity today in Paris! Immediately, I set out to convince and persuade my husband about the value of such a visual experience.</p>
<p>Convince: using arguments to make someone adhere to your cause.</p>
<p><em>“It’s an interesting visual experience, a cinematographic installation of 13 screens that show films simultaneously. It’s a cinematic immersion. These are major manifestos of art and politics, and a provocative performance in itself which illustrates the need for art to be free, to move boundaries</em> (talk about freedom to a Frenchman, it always works!). <em>And we've never been to the Beaux-Arts gallery. It seems that the building itself is very interesting</em> (talk architecture to someone whose job is construction, a good strategy too).”</p>
<p>Persuade: playing on feelings and emotions to make someone adhere to your cause.</p>
<p><em>"Cate Blanchett plays 13 different roles, she is a fabulous actress, she is <strong>so beautiful</strong> ... And then she speaks, we will hear <strong>her beautiful hoarse voice</strong></em> (speak of Cate's voice to anyone: the impression is the same on men as on women…).”</p>
<p>I get my way easily - he knows it’s hopeless to resist. So, here we are, in a magnificent historic building on the left bank facing the Seine, on the Quai Malaquais. From the beginning of the journey in the vast gallery, I worry it is going to be complicated: no French subtitles, everything is broadcast in English, which, if not already difficult to understand, now made completely inaudible by the simultaneity of the projections, the high volume, and, let's say it, the theoretical or even obscure character of certain manifestos (honestly, have you read the manifesto of the Suprematists, or the Situationists one?). It talks, it talks, but it does not speak to us.</p>
<p>I throw concerned glances at my husband. He walks around and stops randomly in front of the screens. He seems interested ... I relax and let myself take in the view. I'm immersed in Cate's appearances, Cate's metamorphoses, her hypnotic presence on the screens. She is a school teacher, worker, puppeteer, scientist, homeless man, SHE IS EVERYTHING! And there is her voice, the unique inflection of her voice, and no matter what she is saying - she could read the phone book - that voice is her. Her presence seems to multiply,.SHE IS EVERYWHERE. The impression is dizzying. It’s not Cate I came to see. It is Carol who I am meeting here, her very essence.</p>
<p>A goddess.</p>
<p>On the way to the hotel after the exhibition, my husband said these fantastic words: "I didn't understand everything, but I found it absolutely gorgeous."</p>
<p>Such was our personal manifesto on that day, this unpretentious but so-true definition of art.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong> <span class="u">Obsession</span> </strong>
</p>
<p>I began to read, to look for whatever I could to dig deeper into <em>Carol</em>. In front of me was a dense and deep forest, which I entered with a determined step and began to cut my way.</p>
<p>I quickly ran out of French articles. Some dated from the previous year: <em>Carol </em>had been presented at the Cannes festival 2015 where Rooney Mara had even received an award for the best actress, jointly with a French actress for a film in a very different register. Why had I missed the information? What had happened that had made me miss it, while I used to follow the events of the festival fairly diligently?</p>
<p>After the French reviews, I tackled the Anglo-Saxon press which had covered much more of the film's release. From there begins my intensive practice of English, which allowed me to read with much more fluidity. As I progressed in this exploration, I learned more about the genesis of the film, the writing of the screenplay, and the novel from which it was adapted. I needed no other motivation - I started sleeping with my language dictionary.</p>
<p>It was only natural that one day I found myself reading <em>The Price of Salt</em> in its French version. I had a vague idea of Highsmith’s writing. I must have read the “Ripleys”, and I associated the author with the police genre, although darker. I didn't have the slightest idea of this other register that I discovered in <em>The Price of Salt</em>.</p>
<p>I did not enter the novel effortlessly. It didn't "give itself to me" easily on first reading. The writing even seemed pretty cold to me. I have often thought that without seeing the film first, I probably wouldn't have made the book my own. As I read it over and over, each reading seemed to gradually fracture the opacity of its surface. I slowly accepted Therese’s limited view, the only external access to the character of Carol. I became familiar with Highsmith's elliptical writing, her unspoken moments, her silences, her metaphors, her dark humor. There are so many layers in this novel. I also understood that her writing corresponded to the atmosphere of the time, the difficulty of explicitly writing certain things when it came to sexuality. I enjoyed finding key moments from the film, and I even let myself be carried away passionately in the road trip of the two women, much longer, westwards, to Colorado. This is my favorite part. I realized how much the film had transcended the novel, had given it body, had finally made sensitive all that was still abstract for me in the novel. The film finally gave us access to Carol, the object of Therese’s desire. Reading the novel, I felt myself in Therese more than ever, and more than ever, I was in love with Carol.</p>
<p>Online I found the script written by Phillis Nagy. It was another revelation. If the dialogues reminded me vividly of the film, I discovered that certain passages had been cut in the editing, at least in the commercial version of the film. To my surprise - and disappointment - I found that significant moments had been removed, including Richard, and mostly Abby! At the same time, I admired the rewrite work done by Phyllis Nagy, and her great idea of starting and ending the film with the same scene filmed with two different points of view, the tea scene at the Ritz and the impromptu arrival of Jack: “Therese, is that you?”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>By this point, <em>Carol</em> had become a chronic illness. It was time for me to question myself about her hold on me.</p>
<p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>My endless gratitude to my two brilliant - and patient- editors, SimplySally and Pentimento. Your advice and support are everything.<br/>Thank you to my friend Win whose knowledge on Carol is spectacular, and whose help is unconditional.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Dissecting Carol</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hope you like dissection dear readers...</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>All the arts are like mirrors where a human being knows and recognizes something of himself.</em>
</p><p>Alain</p><p> </p><p>My heart pounding with emotion, I found myself immersed in the beauty of a film that I couldn’t leave. I felt touched in a deeply personal way. Around me, the reactions to the film were more moderate. Many of my friends had loved it, as had my family, but never at this level of intensity. I wanted to know why <strong><em>Carol </em></strong>was speaking so intimately to me. I knew the time had come to take a closer look at the problem, and so, with my sharp brain as my only tool, I began to analyze the object of my love. I began dissecting <strong><em>Carol</em></strong>.</p><p>Dear reader, I might as well admit - I love dissection. I'm not talking about the unfortunate frogs or the ox hearts that made me nauseous in early morning science classes during high school. I'm talking about texts, novels, plays, poems, and even films, whose dissected remains fill my study and my shelves over the course of a 30-year career as a French teacher. I have more than a few hours of dissection on the clock, I admit. I never tire of deconstructing, of looking at the individual pieces under my microscope, of reconstituting again only to admire the beauty of the whole anew. It is like taking apart the intricate workings of a clock just to see the hidden parts and find out (forgive me!) what makes it tick. Just see it, reader, as the confession of one more minor perversion. I appeal to your indulgence.</p><p>With the precision of a Dexter, without trembling, but conscious of approaching the most intimate object of my love, I cut heartily. As I was leaning over to inspect, I stayed stunned: I was seeing a picture, and that picture was me. <em>Carol</em> contained a mirror that reflected me threefold. I recognized the lover, the mother, and the woman.</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">A Love Story</span>
</p><p>
  <em>I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one. The other with whom I am in love designates for me the specialty of my desire.</em>
</p><p>Roland Barthes, <em><span class="u">A Lover's Discourse: Fragments</span> </em> </p><p> </p><p>First, there is love, falling in love<strong>,</strong> living in an obsessive state for the other, trying to see the loved one by all means, all the time. This is the evidence of love, because it was you and because it was me. I have been this lover. I am. I will forever be.</p><p>Therese is literally fascinated by Carol, by anything about Carol. She looks at her, captures moments during which Carol is not necessarily aware of being watched, and takes pictures of her. Then she sees Carol without make-up, in the truth of what she is: a creature with innate grace, able to rise and walk as one dances, in a single, smooth movement which mocks all the laws of gravity; a tender and mischievous mother, madly in love with her daughter; a woman in disarray, whose shaking hands light a cigarette, desperately absorbing the smoke which will soothe her inner turmoil; a woman abandoned to sleep, her guard lowered.</p><p>What remains then is the very essence of her being --an unvarnished, vulnerable, natural beauty. Everything is beautiful in the loved one, everything is likable and desirable, even - or perhaps above all? - weaknesses.</p><p>Therese's gestures mesmerized me during the film, gestures that could have been mine: how she voluptuously writes Carol’s name on her diary in a beautiful round writing, or how she buries her face in Carol's blue sweater picked up from her suitcase, and inhales her scent. The name of the loved one, the smell ... all the fetishism of love and desire. </p><p> </p><p>In <strong><em>On love</em></strong>, in the chapter entitled <strong><em>On the Birth of Love</em></strong>, the 19<sup>th</sup>-century French writer Stendhal describes a phenomenon he calls crystallization, or the stages a lover passes through to adorn the loved one with all qualities, even imaginary. This phenomenon is made possible by the distance with the loved one, and the doubt about his/her feelings. This is exactly what happens to Therese when she looks at Carol in the film, and even more so in the novel since we are only given access to Therese's point of view there. When I read the novel after the film, I was struck by Carol’s apparent coldness, as I mentioned before. She often appears unpredictable, indecipherable, opaque, but at the same time fascinating and attractive. This happens to such an extent that I could have misunderstood this character had I not read the novel several times. I remember an exchange I had with Patriciahighsmith_fan in the comment section of Pentimento’s <em>Fire, Water, and Rock</em>. Why, Pat asked, did she love the Carol from Highsmith so much (and the very opaque one from <em>Fire, Water and Rock</em>), when she seemed so cold and distant, so imperfect? I believe that this is exactly the crystallization phenomenon described by Stendhal. With Carol, we are ready to love everything, even those traits that keep us at a distance. We are Therese, and this process of identification makes us live, from inside, this mechanism. Carol seems to be cold, but this very coldness seduces us, providing a separation that only intensifies our desire. </p><p> </p><p>Three moments in the movie always take my breath away, and I never tire of seeing them.</p><p>In a New York department store on Christmas Eve, a young saleswoman sees a splendid woman in a fur coat appear in front of her, looking lost. Their eyes meet, creating a visual shock and the effect of love at first sight for Therese.</p><p>In a motel room, on New Year’s Eve, Carol kisses Therese for the first time. She caresses her body, she admires her youth and her beauty. She undresses and wants to turn off the light, but Therese expresses her desire to see her naked. "Don’t. I want to see you."</p><p>At the end of the story, after showing Therese's boredom during a social evening and then shots of her walking through the night, the filmmaker shows her entering a dining room. She looks for Carol, sees her, walks forward, their gazes find each other… Therese is no longer the angel flung out of space, she has become a miraculous apparition who captivates Carol. The film can end. This second encounter is like a new "first encounter" which seems to mirror the initial scene. In this final scene, where the roles seem to have been reversed, the young saleswoman has become a delightful object of desire. Carol is stunned, transported, and experiences the same visual shock as Therese did in their first encounter.</p><p>I pondered why these three moments struck me as emotionally absolute moments of grace. And I finally understood that it was a way to visually express what passion feeds on. It feeds on seeing the loved one, to access again and again what in classical French language is called the amorous “transport”. Our transport, our enjoyment, our rapture comes from the view.</p><p> </p><p>In a love story - in our love stories - we want to believe, madly, that we were made for each other. We are like two halves that find each other, two beings destined to be one from all eternity. This is Tristan and Yseult, Romeo and Juliet. This is you and me. This is always the first time ever. How is this miracle possible, that in the midst of the vast universe we have found each other? Carol and Therese replay for us this miracle that I want to believe until my end. Everything separates them – age, social background, the condemnation of society. And yet, it was written that they were made for each other. So much chance for my path to meet yours, my love: I forgot my gloves on your counter, you sent them back to me. I invited you out for lunch. Would you accept? With baby steps, we made our way, we had our dance of desire, and I found you when just yesterday I didn't even know I was looking for you.</p><p> </p><p>Carol and Therese's story is a myth, just like Romeo and Juliet, but an even more beautiful myth, because it invites us to believe that a happy ending is possible, despite all the obstacles raised between the two lovers. I desperately want to believe, and I do, that love is magic, that it finds its way, that it can overcome any obstacle.</p><p>In this universal story of love, of falling in love, I never questioned the fact that it was about two women. Everything seems familiar to me, everything is speaking about myself. Love is love, it manifests itself however it wants, no matter how capriciously. Anyone who does not recognize herself in <strong><em>Carol</em> </strong>has never been in love.</p><p> </p><p> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">A mutual female emancipation</span>
</p><p>Another issue deeply touches me in <strong><em>Carol</em></strong>: the story of female emancipation. Or rather, two emancipations that are played out jointly, one made possible by the other. Women break free from social shackles that hinder them and finally become who they want to be, not what society has determined they must be. In this respect, it goes far beyond the question of their sexuality, or at least this is only one aspect of the problem. They are first of all women, in a very specific period of history, and for this reason, they are not free from the start.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“I barely even know what to order for lunch”</em>
</p><p><em>Carol</em>, Todd Haynes</p><p> </p><p>Let’s talk about Therese first. I really love her character, because she is a woman just coming into her own. I often think that <strong><em>Carol</em></strong> could be seen or read as a bildungsroman, an initiation story. It has some of the common characteristics: Therese is young, innocent, and a painful past has made her an orphan. She has aspirations - she would like to be a photographer or a designer of theater sets, but her social situation requires she make her living as a saleswoman at Frankenberg’s department store.</p><p>Constrained by the fifties dominant social model, she is engaged to Richard, who never imagines Therese might have thoughts or desires of her own. How can you blame him? Richard is a male archetype of that time (and maybe of all time). When you are a man, you belong <em>de facto</em> to the dominant genre. Can we reproach him for being unresponsive to what Therese really wants? Not this 5O's Richard, because he is a pure product of his time and his genre. I say it once and for all, at the risk of making some enemies here, but Richard is not the bad guy. Therese could have found worse. However, we all agree that she is going to find a lot better.</p><p>I see this initial Therese in the movie, and mostly in the book, as a locked, immobile creature who has not yet decided to act. Invisible forces paralyze her. She is at first a passive spectator of the world and its inhabitants, then progressively more involved when she begins to take pictures of them.</p><p>Carol’s meeting is the trigger, the start of her emancipation. She goes to Carol's house. Carol encourages her to do photography (<em>« Is that what you want to be? A photographer? »)</em>. She leaves Richard to go on a trip with Carol, thus abandoning the idea of a trip to Paris (Richard's project more than hers). She is sentimentally and sexually revealed to herself by Carol. Therese is moving, Therese is acting, Therese is being born. All of this happens because of Carol.</p><p>Paradoxically, Carol’s departure after the Tommy Tucker episode contributes to the process of emancipation. After the trauma of abandonment and all its violence (tears, vomiting, collapsing), Therese starts living by herself. She puts her apartment (her life?) in order, she repaints, she sorts photos. She finds a job that challenges her and allows her to be creative.</p><p>This evolution allows her to freely join Carol at the end of the story. I often think of the letter Carol left before returning to Rindy and Harge: “ …you will understand this one day… I have much to do, and you, my darling, even more… I would do anything to see you happy, and so I do the only thing I can: I release you.” It’s a heartbreaking and beautiful break-up letter… And yet some words are striking, like an implicit message of love from Carol to Therese: "you have so much to do, you will understand one day". Leaving Therese alone, Carol makes a grand gesture. It is certainly, for her, an attempt to save her motherhood and custody of Rindy, but it is also a generous gesture, however painful it may be. It's about giving Therese the opportunity to proceed on her own, without Carol's overwhelming shadow, to make independent choices, both professionally and in love.</p><p>"I release you." To emancipate herself is also to free herself, for a time, from this devouring passion, alienating like all passions, and to become fully adult. For Therese to come back to Carol and fully choose her, first Carol had to leave her. So from ordeal to ordeal, Therese takes the steps of an initiatory journey that makes her an adult, a fulfilled and independent woman. She has made her way in society, she freely makes the choice of a personal life. Nothing will be imposed on her anymore.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“I’m her mother for God’s sake. Morality clause. […] There’s nothing moral about taking Rindy away from me”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“What happened with Therese… I wanted. I won’t deny it […].”</em>
</p><p><em>Carol</em>, Todd Haynes</p><p> </p><p>Of course, this is also about Carol's emancipation, and on this level, the situation is much more complex because it involves more important constraints. Carol Aird is a married woman from a bourgeois background. Her husband’s family is wealthy, and Harge Aird seems very concerned with social conventions. Carol is the mother of a little girl, Rindy. We are in the fifties in an America where society must follow a unique model. Yet Carol suffocates in a frustrating marriage.  She is worried about the future, especially since Rindy could become a pawn in a violent divorce. However, while going to do her Christmas shopping in a department store in Manhattan, she meets the green eyes of a young employee wearing a red Santa hat.</p><p>Carol has already experienced a love affair with Abby, who has remained her confidante. However, with Therese, she makes the choice of boldness which can, and will, cost her dearly. By abandoning her husband with whom she is already in divorce proceedings, she ignores the social codes of the time. The repercussions are immediate. Harge uses this incident to accuse his wife of having a dissolute life and demands sole custody of Rindy, as if her sexuality could make her a bad mother! Carol is faced with a shocking dilemma that shouldn't happen. Indeed, at no time is Harge Aird, who is possibly violent and - at the very least - disturbed and vaguely alcoholic called into question as a father! This appalling injustice revolts me.</p><p>The ensuing road trip that Carol and Therese undertake is like a liberation, a possible flight from the societal prison. These are the only rare moments in the film where we can see the outside world, even though most of the time the two women are locked (protected?) in Carol’s car or in hotel rooms. Then comes the night in Waterloo, whose illumination closes on them like a trap.</p><p>Carol has no choice but to return to Harge to try and save her status as a mother. A real descent into hell begins for her, made up of loneliness and therapy sessions supposed to "cure" what was still considered a disease at the time. Maternal love is capable of the greatest sacrifices, but months go by, and Carol is still kept at a distance from Rindy. Meanwhile, her love for Therese does not weaken. One day, she sees Therese crossing a New York street… rapture again. This is when Carol reaches the dimension of a tragic heroine: she chooses her own destiny and is true to herself.</p><p>She writes a letter to Therese to arrange an encounter. To the lawyers and to a dumbfounded Harge, to all these men who judge her and condemn her in advance, even those who are supposed to defend her, she declares that she does not deny she wanted what happened with Therese and she only asks for regular visitations with Rindy because she can never be a good mother if she lives <strong><em>against her own grain</em></strong>. It is a grandiose and powerful scene! Cate should have received the Oscar for that one performance alone. I had tears in my eyes. We were reaching the sublime.</p><p>In no way does she choose Therese over Rindy. Besides, there is no guarantee that Therese will come to her later that day, or that she will even listen to her and accept what she offers. Here is a woman who just chooses to be herself -- that is, to be free, even though society makes her pay the price. It is a display of honesty, heroism, and female courage.</p><p> </p><p>----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>I'm afraid I was a little too theoretical in the last part. I forgot to take my scholarly hat off, but I admit that the stories of female emancipation have always inspired me, as individual destinies of women heralding possible changes. I don’t feel like I have been oppressed in my life choices or even had to fight to live them. However, I think of my mother who, within a few years, could have been Therese or Carol, and what it took for her to pursue an education in an environment where girls left school at age 16. She became the only one of her family to study at university and graduate. I also remember that she had to struggle to be able to work, because my father, however tolerant, considered that his own salary was enough and that she would have done better to take care of “his” three children full-time. This struggle to live within her own grain is my vivid and cherished legacy. It reminds me that my present freedom can never be taken for granted.</p><p> </p><p>I am a woman, a mother, and a lover, and that's how I watched <strong><em>Carol</em></strong>. No doubt the stakes would be different today for Carol. Society has changed (well, not everywhere and not completely), but the fight for a woman to find her place in society is always difficult. The status of mother is still too often presented as a duty accompanied by sacrifice. How many of us still today forget ourselves, lose ourselves, in the hope of ensuring the emotional security of our children? How many of us today still suffer physical or moral violence from men, and from the society as a whole? Finally, why should I have to choose between being a mother and a lover? Why should I have to justify my sexuality or accept the one that society wants me to have? In the name of what principle?</p><p> </p><p>I saw <strong><em>Carol </em></strong>as a great love story, deep and universal, and I found it wonderful that a love between two women celebrates the universality of love. It is maybe the most beautiful way to express universality.</p><p>I understood <strong><em>Carol</em></strong> like a great feminist film, not an emphatic demonstration, but a subtle illustration. It is particularly exceptional how women are so beautifully captured through the eyes of a man. Men like Todd Haynes are far too rare in cinema, and elsewhere.</p><p> </p><p>The Latin author Terence said: <em>I am human, and I consider nothing human foreign to me. </em></p><p>I will say, I am a woman: nothing feminine is foreign to me.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>My endless gratitude to my two brilliant - and patient- editors, SimplySally and Pentimento. If this text seems to come out of a bilingual brain, it is thanks to them.<br/>Thanks also to Win, the queen of archivists, fastest than any search engine.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Exploring the 8th continent</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Spoiler alert! In this chapter, I will be discussing some plot details of A Science of Uncertainty, Fire, Water and Rock, There is Always a Cost, Woodwinds and Chiaroscuro. Go and read them first if you are worried about spoilers. </p>
<p>My endless gratitude to SimplySally and Pentimento, my challenging and generous editors. You teach me a lot.<br/>Thanks to my friend Win, living memory of this fandom.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>“[A] real book has become the most precious thing. A human being is talking to you and it seems to you that he is saying precisely what you expected, what you wanted to say but would never have known how to say. It is very simple and wonderfully strange. These words, which are also your words, as if by the effect of a charm, are suddenly endowed with a new power, and you are curiously rid of yourself and become another, finer, more delicate, deeper than yourself. You are in the world you would love to live in, but you never imagined it could be so beautiful.” </em>
</p>
<p>Jean Guéhenno, Old writer's notebook</p>
<p> </p>
<p>One day, no doubt tired of this endless journey among the movie, the script and the novel, I set out to find something new. I found myself in front of a closed door. On it were inscribed three mysterious signs: AO3. Secret code, enigmatic inscription, hieroglyph?   </p>
<p>I decided to push open this door. </p>
<p>Before April 2016, I didn't know anything about fanfiction. I never imagined what I was about to discover there. AO3 is a continent, a whole world, maybe even a kind of parallel universe. What is published there, at least on the fandom Carol and TPOS, defies all imagination. Creativity is limitless, freedom abounds, and writers are daring, generous, and talented. I will quote here a few authors known, likely, to most readers.</p>
<p>I want to say in advance that I haven't read many fanfictions because English is not my primary language and most of the publications are in English. I made some reading choices, and I have also been an irregular reader, reading many stories for the first two years, then moving away from the fandom a little to come back around March of 2020. I have mostly been a loyal reader to a few authors to whom, let me say without shame, I gave my heart. I don't intend here to assert any truths, but only to share my modest and very subjective experience, for what it is worth. I apologize to those authors who read these lines and are not mentioned. I still have many discoveries to make.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span class="u">First steps</span>
</p>
<p>So began my first steps, as uncertain as those of a small child.</p>
<p>I was drawn to the possibility of a<strong> Carol</strong> sequel and looking for an answer to the obsessive post-Oak Room question. I started to read a story that had already started some time ago, <strong>Built for Two</strong>, by Employee645A. Despite my English, still a little deficient, I read this story imagined as a continuation with real pleasure. It was particularly well-written and documented. What a feat, I thought, to recreate the atmosphere and even the culture of an era and to make it sound right. My first steps were awkward then, and I moved slowly in my reading and I ended up catching up and finding myself synchronized with the publication of the chapters in progress. Then I experienced something new: waiting. Each chapter end left me hungry, eager to read more, and the wait added to the pleasure of reading. Without realizing it, I was reading more and more easily, and my brain isolated the words that I did not understand - fewer and fewer - to check at the end of my reading. I consider Employee645A the author whose writing definitely made English accessible to me and gave me the answer I was waiting for about Carol and Therese: a happy ending and a whole life together had been possible.</p>
<p>I felt emboldened and embarked on a new discovery: some authors were writing short texts or stories which were a sort of rewriting of TPOS, to restore missing episodes, or imagine episodes possible between Carol and Therese. This is how I met Towanda. I especially loved <strong>The Letters</strong>. What an extraordinary project, ambitious from a literary standpoint and carried out brilliantly. Towanda imagines the letters Therese wrote to Carol when they met and during the events that led them to each other. These letters are later rediscovered when the two women are finally reunited. For Carol, to read them is to retrace the path of love that led each to the other. I was shivering with emotion as I read the chapters. Towanda's writing is a splendor. You can feel how permeated she is with Patricia Highsmith's writing, but it is never a vulgar copy. The original text nourishes her, and its assimilation is a kind of alchemy that gives the very personal and unique style of Towanda. This coming and going between the past of the novel and the present life together for the two heroines remains for me one of the most beautiful reading experiences I have had on the fandom. I had never dared to say it publicly until today.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>At this point, I finally dared to venture into an unknown land; the rewritings in alternate universes. For quite a long time, I had felt uncomfortable about it - I wanted my two heroines in their original environment. And then, one day, seduced by the first lines of a story, I embarked on a great adventure. It was <strong>Waterloo<em>, </em></strong>from Odeon. I would like to say here that for a French citizen, being seduced by a story that bears the name of one of France's most terrible historical defeats, is the shame of all shame! Waterloo, before being a London station, is Napoleon's swan song, the bitter defeat against the English, France’s eternal enemy! But for all of us in love with <strong>Carol</strong>, Waterloo is a small town in the Midwest and a mediocre motel room. It is the night of all nights, and Carol and Therese's first time. It is also the trap of the despicable Tommy Tucker.</p>
<p>In the first chapter of <strong>Waterloo</strong>, we are at the Tate Modern in London, in the room dedicated to the paintings of Mark Rothko. A seated blonde woman gazes at one of the paintings, while a young brunette woman standing behind her, watches her gazing at the painting. It’s a hypnotic start.</p>
<p>Everything resonates with me here. First, the place is familiar to me. On each of my visits to London, I pass by the Tate Modern only for the Rothko room. Walking into the Rothko room is like entering a sanctuary: I sit down, I look, and I find myself caught in the vibrant color of the canvases. It is a mystical experience for contemplative souls. I am not a practitioner, but if I had to define what prayer is for me, I would say it is the contemplation of an abstract painting by Rothko: time stands still, being merges into color. There are no more words, just the raw emotion and sensation, the certainty of being in front of Absolute Beauty, tears in my eyes.</p>
<p>Then there is the situation: a character gazes at a woman sitting with her eyes lost in a painting… Hitchcock, <strong>Vertigo</strong>! It is one of the most fascinating films I know, seen dozens of times, and still so powerful --the story of a hypnotic and mysterious blonde whose mystery is revealed to the obsessed lover who endlessly follows her. What a brilliant reference! Carol as Madeleine, and Therese as Scottie. The analogy was very smart: Carol always seems so mysterious to Therese.</p>
<p>In other words, I was immediately embroiled in the story. This was my very first experience of <strong>Carol</strong> in an alternate universe. Interestingly enough, I discovered that it worked, that it was absolutely fascinating to find the Carol story in another context, the situations revisited, the dialogues developed, the issues deepened, the characters reimagined. It needed a subtle and cultivated author, able to create links between works, a creative spirit whose talent I was going to discover in a profusion of works. </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span class="u">Enchanted lands </span>
</p>
<p>Then began for me an enchanted walk and an endless game in this new world that I had made mine. I went from story-to-story and found that anything could be imagined without ever betraying the myth. Carol and Therese could live today. They could be from another era, such as the 18th century in Great Britain, as in <strong>Light of my Life</strong> by TeamSharma, or from the end of the Middle Ages in an imaginary kingdom evoking France or England, as in the series <strong>Carol of the Woods</strong> from Oberon2016. Best of all, their stories worked! Even the historical distance made it possible to highlight themes specific to Highsmith's story: male domination, the repressed talent of women, religious and social prejudices, motherhood, the desire for emancipation, and free sexuality.</p>
<p>With TeamSharma, you will find a very great knowledge of the historical period she chose, and many artistic, pictorial or musical references. Her writing is lovely, and her story captivating and smart. As for Oberon… I find her writing absolutely unique. The chapters are always short and concise, but the writing is extraordinarily poetic. It is not even writing anymore, it is a voice. I can almost read with my eyes closed. To read Oberon is to listen to a tale from the dawn of time, Carol and Therese are the queen and the bird catcher. In times troubled by terrible events, famine, war, climate catastrophe, and an epidemic, the couple has never seemed so mythical, and their love is more than ever a miracle. Their story has never been more current. <strong>Carol of the Woods</strong> is a long, medieval tapestry that unfolds its narrative cycle made of embroidered and delicate patterns. This wonder is neither in a museum, nor at the counter of a bookstore, but here, humbly displayed on this fandom.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I also find constantly-renewed pleasure in discovering the many facets of the two heroines. Two rules remain intact: one is older than the other, Carol is blonde and Therese is brunette. That being said, the authors can imagine all the possibilities. Carol is a teacher, and Therese is her student. Carol is a doctor, and Therese is her intern. Carol is an oboist, and Therese is a clarinetist. Carol is a nurse, and Therese is a skate girl. Carol is a chef, and Therese is her sous chef. Carol is completing her thesis, and Therese is a librarian. Carole is a jazz singer, and Therese is a pianist. Carole is a single mother, and Therese is a photographer. Carole is a park ranger, and Therese is a geologist… it's never-ending, it's always new, it's the two of them forever.</p>
<p>Each new story looks like a new distribution of the cards and the game can start over, always being different, while keeping the basic pre-established rules. Endless possibilities. Carol is married or single? In some stories Harge is present, sometimes he has a very secondary role, sometimes a rather terrible major role. In<strong> Woodwinds,</strong> Soundtracker makes Harge a very dangerous stalker who breaks into his ex-wife's house and attacks her. In <strong>There Is Always a Cost</strong>, Calliesghost makes him a violent alcoholic who blackmails Carol, molests her, and nearly kills their daughter. He has the same very disturbing role in <strong>Chiaroscuro,</strong> where he tries to break into the apartment building where Carol lives when he is forbidden to approach it. It’s a menacing Harge hanging over Carol’s fate, as in the original story. Fucking Harge.</p>
<p>Is Carol a mother? In many stories, we find Rindy, an essential stake in the original plot. How old is she? Is she a baby like in <strong>A Chance to Dream</strong>, a little girl like in <strong>Chiaroscuro</strong>, or a young teenager like in <strong>Better Than Fiction</strong>? And even a boy, like in <strong>Skating By</strong>?</p>
<p>What place should Abby be given? A close friend, a former lover, an associate, a confidante, a godmother, or a lover who is always a little jealous - even disturbing - as in <strong>Fire, Water, and Rock</strong> (<em>snakeinthegrassbitch Abby</em>…)?</p>
<p>Characters who barely have supporting roles in the book or film are sometimes assigned new roles. Calliesghost has no equal when it comes to exploiting the full range of characters evoked in the film or the novel by using their whole potential. Her stories are almost choral, we follow the path of several people, and their fascinating confrontations sound like theater scenes. Genevieve Cantrell, barely present in the film and mentioned only at the end of the novel, should be particularly thankful to CG. She has made her an absolutely fascinating (and terrible) character, both attractive and destructive. She is an authentic personality in conflict with the Therese/Carol couple.</p>
<p>Another example is Sister Alicia, a character mentioned in Therese's memories from the orphanage. In her stories so full of spirituality, Gracesgirl has made her a wonderful, benevolent, and wise mother figure. Her boundless and uncompromising love gives Therese and Carol's relationship all its legitimacy and all its meaning to Saint Francis's message of universal love.</p>
<p>All these discoveries delighted me as so many possible variations on my two heroines. I often think that Carol and Therese must be infinitely grateful to all those authors who, by rewriting their story over and over again, make them exist forever. So many fictional characters have been condemned to oblivion and lie for all time in the dusty limbo of some library shelf, the mass graves of all literature. Thanks to the wonderful authors of this fandom, Carol and Therese will escape this fate.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span class="u">Learning to Read</span>
</p>
<p><em>Carol</em> taught me to read.</p>
<p>I mean to read otherwise. Like all readers who came along to AO3, I began by reading stories that were completed, or in the process of being completed. I then witnessed the birth and development of stories that I was able to follow chapter after chapter from their beginning. They are two very different experiences. The second is priceless. I remember a comment from Grillosa on this point recently in the comment section of <strong>Fire, Water, and Rock.</strong> She had read, she said, Pentimento's <strong>Chiaroscuro</strong> in one go, while she followed <strong>Fire, Water and Rock</strong> as it continued to be written. What did she prefer? P. asked. Grillosa replied that witnessing the genesis of a work made you feel like a part of it. Great statement. I went exactly through the same experience.</p>
<p>For some reason, I missed out on a major fic: <strong>There is Always a Cost</strong>, by Calliesghost. Determined to make up for lost time, I threw myself into reading this story so loaded with tension and visceral emotions. I was captivated and completely overwhelmed by it. Nothing could have made me stop at the end of a chapter before moving on to the next one. I didn't have to wait. As with a book, I only had to move forward to satisfy my desire and curiosity. My expectation was instantly fulfilled. The only pauses are the ones I have taken to absorb the intensity of the emotions at work in this story and to ponder certain passages whose dazzling beauty still haunts me. Browsing through the comments section, I realized that I had actually missed something. My reading had only been a classic walk through an already-constituted narrative. I had missed the process of its creation. I am a reader of this fiction, but I will always miss the privileged status of witnessing its conception. It is irreparable. This is what it is.</p>
<p>I have visited the Sistine Chapel several times. It’s always the same almost-overwhelming feeling of being in the presence of an absolute masterpiece. However, what a magical experience it must have been to witness the years Michelangelo worked on the painting, lying on a scaffolding 20 meters high. To have witnessed the slow development, the appearance of the motif, its organization, its overall meaning must have been fascinating!  </p>
<p>There is something unique about reading a fiction in the making. We are attending its birth, the gradual deployment of its patterns, like the constitution of a puzzle. The pieces fit together before our eyes at the discretion of the author. We know the sometimes slow wait between chapters, the cliffhangers, the unbearable suspense. We hold our breath, we hide our eyes, we hope, we wait. We desire. We wonder about the author's intentions, we make assumptions. We stop at details, we don't have global vision. We get lost, we find our way. We are impatient and frustrated. It's deliciously exciting and completely addictive.</p>
<p>How I would have adored to be on board for the <strong>There is Always a Cost</strong> journey from the start. Side note: sometimes I imagine CG writing under conditions as complex and exhausting as Michelangelo's. It is particularly sporty and demanding. For the reader, it is always worth waiting.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span class="u">An historical event in the 8<sup>th</sup> continent: The Amputated Leg Affair and The Tent Masturbation Affair</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>To rewrite is to embroider on the motif, to enrich it, to transform it. How far could this transformation go without damaging the original? How far can the experiment be carried out without betraying the myth? The game is mesmerizing!</p>
<p>I cannot help but address two events that hit the headlines on this fandom in the spring of 2020, during the confinement. It was a kind of literary dispute. Readers familiar with Calliesghost and Pentimento know what this is about. I invite others to refer to <strong>A Science of Uncertainty</strong> and <strong>Fire, Water, and Rock</strong> (stories AND readers’ comments) before reading the following.</p>
<p>Let's put it simply: does an author have the right to amputate Therese's leg? Can she describe Carol and Therese masturbating side-by-side in a tent without ever touching each other? Reading the plethora of comments from readers on the chapters in which these scenes were told, one feels that the authors have shifted boundaries here, challenged pre-established, unconscious codes. Let's face it: I have adored witnessing and taking part in this heated debate. No media has echoed it, for everything has been kept at the very-confidential level of this fandom and those who follow these two stories, but it will remain forever in our memories.</p>
<p>In <strong>A Science Of Uncertainty,</strong> Carol and Therese are doctors participating in a humanitarian mission in Syria. Therese is seriously injured by a bomb. When she is found, a decision must be made to save her and extract her from the vehicle she is in. The chapter ends with this crucial choice that Carol will have to make. The word is never mentioned, but all readers understand: Therese's leg is going to be amputated. Immediately, there was a thunder of lamentations and pleas (I was not the last one on it!): "No, CG, not that, don't cut Therese's leg please, make a miracle!" By the way, I wonder what it feels like when so many people cry out to you like this? Dear CG, didn't you feel like a demiurge, an almighty creature for a moment? Is it an exhilarating feeling? Or is it just a little boring to hear such a concert of mourners? Both I guess…</p>
<p>In the next chapter, after a temporal ellipse, we are in Vienna at a hospital where we understand that Therese’s leg has indeed been amputated (at the level of the knee) and that her life has been saved. Oddly enough, after a moment of intense emotion (with the possible exception of one comment) everyone sighs in relief. Yes, an author can amputate Therese's leg for the sake of a script - and also to save her life - because better a one-legged Therese than no Therese at all. Most importantly, what CG makes us realize once again is that only love can heal this kind of trauma - all trauma. By crossing the limits of the original scenario, CG shows here that love is limitless. That’s what we’re forever waiting for in Carol and Therese’s story, that absolute promise of love that always saves. Such are CG's stories, tellings of reconstruction and rebirth.</p>
<p>In <strong>Fire, Water, and Rock</strong>, Pentimento unknowingly crossed the invisible boundaries of the myth and shocked many of her most loyal readers. I like to think of Chapter 21 as historical, because it is in a way, and also because I like to tease her. This chapter is a bomb! <strong>Fire, Water, and Rock </strong>is of course a rewrite of <strong>Carol</strong>. It's a romance, and Pentimento excels at it, but it is also a new experience that she imposes on herself, a story that is based on a mystery around an arsonist. I don’t think P was expecting the intensity and passion of the reactions to Chapter 21.  </p>
<p>As a reminder, after an evening spent at Carol's, what should have been the "great night" for both of them, a violent argument arises between Carol and Therese when one learns that the other still has a boyfriend whose existence she hid. Ulcerated, Carol locks herself in her house and leaves Therese in despair. Later that night, while Therese is in her tent, she hears footsteps and sees a light. Her tent is opened, and Carol appears and slips inside. Every reader is holding her breath... but instead of a love scene, Carol lays down next to Therese and begins to masturbate while staring intently at the young girl. Surprisingly, Therese begins to do the same. The scene is dreamlike: without ever taking their eyes off each other but without ever touching each other (or almost), the two women reach their peak of pleasure almost at the same time. It is painfully beautiful, but it’s also very jarring because it’s not what we were expecting. Inside us, something is hurt. Carol is no longer the Carol we are used to knowing. The first sexual encounter between our heroines can't look like this scene. Disbelief was widespread. For a while, I thought this scene was a dream, as the writing suggested but no, it was real. The scene was perfectly justified when the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in the following chapters.</p>
<p>Yet something has been damaged in the iconic image we have of Carol. Why do we have a harder time dealing with a 'parallel' masturbation scene than a Therese with an amputated leg? We all ask ourselves the question: maybe this refers to our conception of masturbation? I believe that masturbation has never been the problem here. What makes us uncomfortable and even upsets us is the lack of reciprocity of the gesture. Carol refrains from touching Therese, and she silently imposes the same rule on Therese. Yet, we can only envision the sex between them as a moment of total harmony, the absolute encounter of their beings where flesh and soul become one. We are forever longing for the Waterloo night. P has deceived our expectations. Actually, she deceived nothing at all, it is we who are projecting our expectations onto a scenario and who decide to adapt it to our desires. However, we are not reading a cheap, sentimental novel here, and P does not write "ready-to-read" products. By shaking up our expectations, she shows us that there are always new depths to explore in the myth of Carol and Therese, and that the legend can still always be told in different ways.</p>
<p>I sometimes wonder if people who pass by the real P on the street are aware that they are in front of a living legend of this fandom, the author of the "misunderstood masturbation," almost as iconic for her readers as Carol herself.  </p>
<p>It is enough that we, fellow readers, have this privilege.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>I never tire of this diversity and the richness it brings to the fics. So many different personalities can write, freely, anonymously, and without fear of judgment. It is as if Carol and Therese’s story could endlessly rewrite itself, not quite the same, not quite different. Could Patricia Highsmith ever imagine, when she wrote her novel, that years later it would spark so much creativity and inspiration?</p>
<p>Art imitates art, always. Every artist is always encouraged to go back to the source. The Venus de Milo has been copied a thousand times, Picasso never tired of copying Las Meninas or the Luncheon on the Grass. Mozart would not have been Mozart without imitating Bach, who himself imitated Vivaldi. Any work is always the more-or-less conscious product of earlier founding works.</p>
<p>To read <strong>Woodwinds</strong> or <strong>There is Always a Cost,</strong> I don't need to know <strong>The Price of Salt</strong>, nor <strong>Carol</strong>. These fictions exist by themselves, like pure creations. But if I scratch the surface of the text a little, I may be able, as on the ancient parchments, to discover an older writing. This is <strong>The Price of Salt</strong>, this is <strong>Carol</strong> whose handwriting, like on a palimpsest, has been "scraped off" and then covered over by more recent handwriting. The original text continues to be read, hidden, and perhaps damaged, but imitated, parodied, continued, completed, transformed, and transcended. The original story, which has become a myth, has multiplied to infinity. Such is the destiny of great works.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>And you, dear readers, what works on the fandom have been most meaningful to you?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Three jewels of a collector</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter is dedicated to three authors who generously let me use extracts from their stories to write my little essay. Pentimento, Soundtracker, SimplySally, your trust and your friendship honor me.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p>How do you choose to read one story over another? Everyone has their own method: one can be attracted by a title or a beautiful cover, by the name of the author, or by the promotion made at the bookstore counter. On the fandom, one can read a short description and identify the tags. As for me, I give you my favorite thing: I like getting caught by the incipit. The incipit (scholarly hat!) is the beginning of a story, the first lines that will speak to the soul and heart, and make me want - or not - to continue. This is the author’s king’s piece, the part not to be failed, like the opening of <em>La Traviata</em>, or the appetizer of a gourmet restaurant: it is a promise. I see it as a hook with the right bait, the fly or the lure that will work. I'm a picky trout when it comes to the incipit. A good incipit needs talent, the precise and beautiful gesture of the fisherman who throws her line on the surface of the water with the right bait: catching a reader is as much a miracle as catching a fish. </p>
<p>I love to collect famous competition hooks: <em>“For a long time I used to go to bed early,”</em> “<em>It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,”</em> <em>“My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know,” “Call me Ishmael.”</em></p>
<p>I assume you perfectly identify those famous opening sentences. I made the effort to choose two Anglo Saxon authors for the sake of balance. The other two are French, but quite recognizable, I hope. We could take a quiz. I love these kinds of games, but that's not the point of this chapter. Next time, if you want.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In this chapter, I would like to describe how, three times, I got caught by talented fisherwomen, whose stories I followed with passion because I knew by biting their hook that the flavor was new to me. Three encounters with three beautiful stories and three amazing authors. Three rewritings of <strong><em>Carol</em></strong> that are, in my inner library, much more than rewritings. And I would officially like to declare my passionate admiration for these three women.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I admit I had fun analyzing the incipits of these three stories, and it is this analysis that I share here. That this has amused me may surprise, but you now know my little quirks. You will see that each incipit contains elements that announce the whole project of the story and allow the reader to feel the personality and the specificity of each writer. They also show great talent and could be used for a master class on how to start a story. Each of the three authors will deny it, but do not listen to them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span class="u">Strange place for an encounter: <strong>A Chance to Dream</strong>, by Pentimento</span>
</p>
<p>“I paint a thousand paintings in my head as I spend time in cars, or looking out windows, or studying the beautiful opacity of bloom atop the blues, purples, and pinks on a fig's skin in my kitchen while I'm cooking. So I suppose, I tend to write the way I see the world.” </p>
<p>Pentimento to Thefrenchlady</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I use to say that Pentimento caught me at the supermarket checkout. Because that's about it. From the first lines, I was captivated by the fluid writing that seemed to flow like water. I was also struck by the attention that was given to objects, to things. There was art in the description, and I am quite a visual person.</p>
<p>As a reminder, I would like to quote the first lines of <strong>A Chance to Dream</strong>.</p>
<p>
  <em>Therese scanned the magazine covers placed strategically at eye level. Actresses, models, and perfectly beautiful women adorned the covers of each one. Photoshopped, she thought to herself. No one looks like that. Her eyes scanned over the multitudes of gum and candy bars intended to entice the bored and impulsive shoppers as they waited in line. She mentally reminded herself to fold the clothes in the dryer tonight.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Reaching for a plastic divider, she placed her salad on the newly available space on the conveyor belt. She glanced toward the cashier who was scanning cartons of baby formula. Her eyes lingered on the remaining groceries on the belt in front of her: baby spinach, chicken breasts, three lemons, eggs, a pint of strawberries, make-up removal wipes, cashews, a romance novel, and a bottle of vodka. Her mind drifted off as she contemplated how personal each person's groceries were. They told a story. Send a hundred people into a store to buy ten items and they would never come out with the same things. People were all so different. Different tastes, different affinities. An infinite number of possibilities.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The subject is given straight away. We're in a 3rd person story in Therese's point of view. This is called (scholarly hat!) an <em>incipit in medias res:</em> we are directly immersed in the action. Here the main character is standing in line at the checkout of a supermarket as evidenced by what she has in front of her (magazine covers placed strategically at eye level and multitudes of gum and candy bars intended to entice the bored and impulsive shoppers). It is a moment of waiting, of boredom, about which in itself there should be nothing to say. Besides, Therese is bored, as we all would be in this kind of situation. Her eyes scan things without really looking at them, because what is there to watch at the supermarket checkout? The verb "scan" itself suggests more a digital device than human eyes. Everything is banal, mediocre, and ugly in its conformism and consumerist intent, as suggested by the description. The wait is long, "She shifted her weight to the other foot," and the character is preoccupied with a mundane household detail (remembering to fold clothes in the dryer). </p>
<p> </p>
<p>I read these opening lines which might sound like total boredom, and yet I am amazed at the attention paid to objects and what they represent. Through the detail of the photos of women in magazines, the author indirectly informs us about Therese: she is sensitive to images and maybe to women, she knows how to analyze pictures and determine their quality (photoshopped!). She also expresses an opinion and values that are not those displayed by these images of retouched female bodies: no one looks like that. She is thus defined outside this society of consumption and interchangeable images; she is not fooled by the intentions behind exhibits like candy. Her areas of interest are elsewhere. We can also think that she is lonely since she remembers that she will have to fold her laundry left in the dryer. Finally, in this "non-setting", which Pentimento knows so well how to make a setting, we discover a solitary character waiting in an environment that does not correspond to her aspirations. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Everything is therefore ready for the event to occur which will meet her aspiration. An event that will bring beauty, life, movement, authenticity, an end to solitude, the complete opposite of what Therese is experiencing in the present moment. It is, of course, the scene which will follow, the literary topos of the first encounter of Therese and Carol, a thousand times replayed and here masterfully reinterpreted. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>The themes of Highsmith are revisited, too. We are in a store, even if Therese is not a salesgirl. We can even hear an echo of Todd Haynes’ film with Therese's inner analysis: No one looks like that / I've never looked like that.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In the following lines, we read the detailed description of the items on the belt of the cash register, those of the customer who precedes Therese. This “still life on a conveyor belt" is, as we will discover later, Carol's items. So, even before having seen Carol, Therese has already grasped the elements that will help to define her ("they told a story"): cartons of baby formula, some food shopping, a romance novel. A portrait is sketched of a young woman, with a baby, who knows how to cook (by the detail of Carol’s foods opposed to Therese's ready-to-eat salad).  Therese then hears her date of birth, requested by the cashier, and it is a smoky voice that hits her ears: " she had never heard such an incredibly sweet sound”. The “Carol Miracle” has just happened. The “Pentimento miracle” begins.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In just a few lines, a setting has been set, a character partially presented, an expectation created, and the connection with the original story has been suggested. It requires great expertise, and I would even say a lot of talent, to succeed in designing it in a seemingly banal beginning. From the first lines, I felt that the author had great mastery in storytelling, a particular way to look at things, a specific sensitivity, a pace. And I knew I was going to love her. She will tell you that all of this came naturally... and that is undoubtedly true because with her these techniques, which some never acquire, even at the cost of hard exertion, seem almost innate. The narration always seems to unfold from her effortlessly, never revealing the meticulous work that preceded it: a wide and deep exhalation driven by an invisible but precise cadence. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Pentimento writes like she breathes.</p>
<p>___________________________________________________________</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>
  <span class="u">Love at first listening: <strong>Woodwinds</strong>, by Soundtracker</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“… it's a bit of a bitch to write, but in a satisfying way.”</p>
<p>Soundtracker to Thefrenchlady</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Soundtracker is unlike anyone. Among the few authors that I have read assiduously on AO3, she will always occupy a special place. I think of her as someone who "doesn't fit into the picture". She's out of the ordinary. Flung out of space. The proof? The start of her wonderful<strong> Woodwinds</strong>. Soundtracker grabbed me with an E flat major scale played by an oboe.</p>
<p>
  <em>Therese Belivet is nearly 20 minutes early. Clutching a clarinet case tightly against her leg, she steps out of the December evening into the warmth of St. Paul’s Chapel. She is sure she’ll be the first person to arrive. However, after doors shut quietly behind her, she is surprised to hear sounds of an oboe. A scale is being played, filling the musty old church, notes lifting toward the ornate ceiling, twisting wildly, then tamed, up and down, adagio then allegro, tremolo to forte, eighth notes switch to thirds then morph seamlessly into quarter notes, winding sweetly about the landscape of an E-flat major scale. Therese has never heard a scale played like this. Never. Therese has never heard anything sound so beautiful. Ever.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Vibrations flow into every crevice of the chapel before carefully landing inside Therese. Dumbfounded in a dark corner of the cathedral lobby she hides, immobile, absorbing every nuance of pitch and tempo, savoring how each note sounds like it is being pulled and coaxed from the instrument with the slightest caress while a powerful vibrato extends the helpless notes into surrender. Delicate and overbearing, complex and simple, the scale becomes the single point of Therese’s awareness. She takes one tiny half step forward summoned toward the sound and its maker.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Here we are again immersed in the heat of the moment from the first lines. Therese Belivet is about to enter St. Paul's chapel on a cold December evening for a chamber music rehearsal. She carries with her the box containing her clarinet. I am all the more absorbed in the action as ST tells it using the present tense, which makes me feel like I am living the moment in its immediacy. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>What happens then is absolutely magical. Therese is early for this rehearsal in which she is supposed to replace a member of the orchestra; she thinks she's alone in the chapel.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>She hears the sound of an instrument in the religious space, a scale in E flat major played by an oboe. And ST makes us SEE it: this music is alive like a plant whose notes wind upward according to the inflections and accelerations around the landscape of this scale. Reverberated by the vaults of the chapel, this music creeps into Therese who absorbs it, savors it. This music is a charm, it captivates and calls, pulls her from herself, caresses her. She's never heard a scale played like that, she's never heard anything so beautiful. Never. Ever. </p>
<p>“<em>It’s just a scale. What the hell's wrong with me?</em> And, then she sees her.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>What we just read is love at first listen. The oboist is Carol, of course. Before even seeing her, Therese heard her and has been caught by grace, enraptured. This is a miracle, and it is in a chapel that this miracle happened. The sacred dimension of the moment indeed required a sanctuary, a premonitory place for another major moment in the story.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>ST is a musician. She was also very marked by the music that Carter Burwell composed for <strong><em>Carol</em></strong>. But what I find absolutely unique - and beautiful - is that in her rewriting of Therese's encounter with Carol, this is hearing before seeing. Even before she saw Carol, Therese heard Carol's breath through the oboe, the expression of her inner being, arguably the most intimate thing about a human being since breath is both breathing and soul. Carol's soul comes to meet Therese’s, and this moment seems to have been planned for all eternity. </p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Woodwinds</strong> is the encounter between two souls, a clarinet and an oboe, their balance, inevitable and foreseen from all eternity by an invisible spirit. The one who tries to impose harmony in the chaos of the world. Each of Soundtracker's stories always seems to be an expression of this powerful intuition: there is a harmony to be found within the chaos. This invisible spirit, if it exists, undoubtedly expresses itself through Soundtracker's pen, and although she is unaware of it, she is one of its finest musical instruments.</p>
<p><br/>___________________________________________________________________________<br/><br/></p>
<p>
  <span class="u">Alabama song: <strong>Better Than Fiction</strong>, by SimplySally</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“I'm not sure I believe in miracles, even in the realm of fiction, but I do believe in the human spirit, the power of love, and that "living against your grain" can become so monstrous that you are willing to make tough choices in your life just to live according to your nature.”</p>
<p>SimplySally to Thefrenchlady</p>
<p> </p>
<p>SimplySally is a fly fisherwoman. I give here the information - with her agreement - to underline the fact that she undoubtedly knows about flies and bait, and that she has no equal for reading the surface of the water in search of the desired trout. Before having the honor to meet her, and to be initiated to fly fishing, I did not know that the surface of the water could be read as some read the depth of the sky. All of this is to say that the first lines of her fiction had everything to seduce me. This woman knows how to hook a reader. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>Life in a small town has its established, predictable patterns. The cycle of the seasons, the last names of the important folks in town, the shop on the corner that keeps changing names and owners, but can never establish solid footing as a reputable business.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Dixon, Alabama was no different. The first names of the residents changed, but the last names mostly didn’t. It was comfortable for most, a luke-warm bath of familiarity. Even the seasons had little in the way of variation. Most of the trees were pines, and kept their green garments on all year round.</em>
</p>
<p><em>Summers were particularly challenging, something to be dreaded rather than welcomed. The red clay earth soaked up the sun until it cracked and turned into dust, coating the windshields of the cars and the roadside grasses. (…)</em> <em>If they were lucky, the weather would be like this through all of July and August and then reluctantly start to release its grip in September. But this year did not look promising, as the ungodly temps had started in early June and showed no sign of letting up. School would be starting on Tuesday, as it always did the day after Labor Day.</em></p>
<p>
  <em>(…)</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>The mill was the heart of the town and several towns around it. Without it, there would be no Dixon, at least not to speak of. The chemicals used to turn the pine trees into pulp and bleach them to be made into toilet paper created an odor of cabbage soup and pesticide that tainted the cloud cover and clung to the clothes of the workers, wafting its way into the town when the wind was right. It provided a reliable income, even if it meant a missing finger here or there, or a smashed foot - all in the name of industry, and for the chance to own a home and a nice car.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>And if the mill was the heart of the town, the library was the brain, small though it might be. Every year they struggled with the budget, dealt with the threats of reduced hours, and begged for donations from the big-name families in town. But still it squeaked by, managed by a frugal librarian who fought with the town every year to keep the funding intact and shopped the booksellers for bargains to keep a few new releases on the shelf at all times.</em>
</p>
<p>
  
</p>
<p>This time we don't start directly in the action, but we go into the story through a description of the setting that I found from the start to be deeply Balzacian. SimplySally creates a setting that will be fundamental to reading the different levels of her story. If I use the Balzacian adjective here, in reference to the realistic novelist Balzac, it is a bit to tease her because she is always embarrassed when I make literary comparisons in her writing.  From the first lines, we feel her desire to anchor the story in reality, a geographic and sociological reality, one of the major challenges of this story, typical of the great French realistic novelists of the 19th century. SimplySally exposes a frame whose signs we will have to decipher.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A small town, Dixon, Alabama, in the 1980s -- for the French reader that I am, this is already a trip within my reading trip. SimplySally takes me to the Deep South. The element that seems to dominate in the description of the set is the repetition of the same predictable pattern: in Dixon, nothing changes, or almost nothing. People always have the same last names, the shops are always miserable, the seasons keep coming back, and there is hardly any difference between them. Everything seems frozen, motionless, stopped. The vegetation itself, made mainly of pines, seems to alter the perception of passing time. In Dixon, time does not pass. Great way to start a story!</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Dixon is also an atmosphere, a hot and sticky summer. The heat is overwhelming. Oppressive. The place is suffocating. The air smells of chemicals and cabbage soup from the nearby paper mill whose industry has helped develop this small community of workers. The factory is the heart of it. It is an economic and sociological model that is portrayed here. Workers and their families have been able to experience the joys of the consumer society at the cost of one or two fingers left in the machines. And already, all of SimplySally’s irony is perceptible in these allusions, her uncompromising outlook on society. If Dixon's heart is the paper mill, its brain is the library, the last element to appear in the setting. In this environment devoted to economic production, the place seems an oasis surviving at the cost of rigorously economical management. The paper that books are made of seems to be of much less value here than the toilet paper made at the factory. And of course, the librarian will be Therese.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This transposition of <strong><em>Carol</em></strong> in space and time seemed to me immediately masterful because it contained a theme that stood out to me so much in <strong><em>Carol</em></strong>: a normed society, a rigid and oppressive framework, in which reassuring habits are in fact only tools of imprisonment, especially for women. I understood from the first lines that I was going to read a story of emancipation because one can only try to flee such places.</p>
<p>Most importantly, what I find most remarkable about this starting point is that Dixon, Alabama, exists in so many forms and in so many eras. By painting a small town in the south of the U.S., SimplySally represented a place both steeped in cultural history and absolutely universal.</p>
<p>The title sounded like a promise: better than fiction... Carol and Therese's story would also have something to do with a lived experience. </p>
<p>I immediately adored the sticky and oppressive setting of this small town in Alabama. It revived stereotypes acquired from a few readings: Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and <em>This Property is Condemned</em> with Natalie Wood and Robert Redford. Dixon was also the perfect starting point to tell one of those emancipation stories that I loved so much. The more suffocating the situations of oppression, the more the oppressed desires are released with passion.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Such is SimplySally: she will tell you exactly the story you wanted to be told, and you didn’t even know you were waiting for it. This story is an unexpected and precious gift. </p>
<p>If the fisherwoman is patient, so will be the trout. I know one day she will catch me with another story. Under the water’s surface, floating in the current, almost motionless, I am waiting. </p>
<p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p>
<p>_________________________________________________________________________</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The counters of bookstores are cluttered with publications. In France at the moment, it is the “rentrée littéraire”, the publishing season. Soon, with the fall, will come the litany of literary awards: Prix Goncourt, Prix Fémina, Prix Renaudot ... Each year, authors "who sell" produce their annual book as an immutable duty ensuring the sustainability of a few publishing houses, and the payment of their taxes. What to choose, what to read, how to navigate this forest of books for the production of which real forests are destroyed? What will be left of this in the future?  </p>
<p> </p>
<p>My shelves are cluttered with books accumulated over the years. They have insidiously colonized the space of a quite-large house. For a long time, we believed we were in control of the situation. A very large bookshelf has been fitted out in our study. It was quickly filled. Other shelves have appeared in various places, bedrooms, living room, entrance hall, kitchen, and even toilets! Sometimes I watch with concern this inexorable saturation of our domestic space. I sort, I classify, I give away books. But very quickly colonization resumes its irrepressible course. “Did I really read all of this?” I ask myself in amazement. What of this is left in me? What will be left of the stories I read, at the end? What will my brain really keep track of, what indelible mark? What will I keep, if we ever keep something, in this "after" that we know nothing about?  </p>
<p> </p>
<p>In the bookshelves of my memory will remain some poems, tirelessly repeated like prayers, some great novels, and plays that have nourished my life. So little, after all. But I know there will also be some wonderful stories, unknown to most, read on this fandom. Among them, there are these three fictions, three gems from my very personal digital collection. They are the winners of my inner literary competition. I regularly take them out of my brain's cabinet of curiosities. I contemplate them, I browse them, I rediscover them, and I put them away, carefully.  </p>
<p> </p>
<p>They are mine, forever.  </p>
<p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>My dear proofreaders, who work for me after your day's work, and even on vacation, I thank you! &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Life in the Comments Section: The Carol Community</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter is dedicated to the dear fellow readers I met in this wonderful collective experience created by the magic of Carol. I especially think of a friendly paste-eating ghost, and a lovely golf-player teddy bear...</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>
  <em>You must travel, you must rub up against other brains, thereby to sharpen your own.</em>
</p><p>Michel de Montaigne, Essais</p><p> </p><p>If you had told me that, in the post-Carol era, I would have friends all over the world, I would have never believed you. The great exploration I undertook guided me to uncharted territories, but above all, it gave me the most beautiful of human experiences. <em>Carol</em> enlarged for me the world.</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">Carol Addicts Anonymous</span>
</p><p>I started my reading journey on the fandom clad in Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. It's a very exciting feeling: we can go through hundreds of stories, read the comments, and attend the interactions between authors and readers, without ever having to assume our real presence. It's enjoyable, the epitome of voyeurism. I admit it without the slightest shame, for we all experienced this delicious feeling when we started out here. Invisibility is the ultimate protection for our shyness, but it is also a bulwark against certain intrusions. Not all of us are ready for the step of visible presence. I didn't think I was when my journey took me here. For a while, I walked around this fandom as if I were the H.G. Wells character, or David McCallum in that series that I used to love when I was child, or Alice in the Woody Allen movie. Invisibility is such a jubilant and great fantasy.</p><p>It was a big step forward to decide to become visible, to let go of the reassuring comfort of my cloak. At one point, the urge to participate became so strong that I decided to drop it for the anonymity of a mask. Long before the pandemic made the mask popular and soon mandatory, I decided to wear a pseudonym. I would be visible, but anonymous, in the midst of a crowd of people all wearing pseudos of their own.</p><p>When I think about how we choose a pseudo, I can't help but think of the very real masks that have become the imposed accessories of our current daily life. All uniform, blue or white, at the start of the pandemic, they are now available in various fabrics and offer all kinds of choices. I bought myself a lovely one with Indian-style blue patterns in silk in Lake Como this summer. This garment speaks of my tastes, it speaks of me. Choosing a pseudo is the same: the words are a pattern, a color, a material that already speaks about us. So, while masking us, our pseudo also defines us. It reveals what we want to show, but also part of what we think we keep hidden.</p><p>What was I thinking the day I decided to wear this pseudo: "thefrenchlady"? I give you here a very personal analysis of my somehow schizophrenic choice.</p><p>French is my specific culture. I want to make that clear in a fandom where the dominant language is English, and the readership is predominantly Anglo-Saxon. It's a very conscious way for me to warn that I don't necessarily speak English very well, which may be reflected in my comments, and also that I come with a different point of view, a French eye on an American film and an American novel. It is also my inferiority complex: no matter how much I understand English, I will always miss certain nuances in my reading. </p><p>Lady ... it's my bad English that betrays me! I want to say I am a woman, not a girl anymore. But thefrenchwoman seems to me too flat, too ordinary. I choose "lady" instead, and suddenly thefrenchlady sounds very chic to my ears. French people are snobs, that's understood – and I admit I'm no exception to the rule. However, despite the quite ridiculous mask of my pseudo, I want to declare once and for all that I am anything but a lady. Please, do as my dear Soundtracker does -- just call me French.</p><p>Being anonymous is like being naked: we are stripped of our social identity. When I am the only one naked, it is awfully awkward. But let’s imagine this fandom as a large nudist camp. We are all unknown, we are all equal, we are all in the nudity of our anonymity. It allows an easy and natural intimacy between us. We all have different ages. We come from different origins, from different countries. We have different backgrounds and different colors. We speak different languages. Some of us are married, some are single. We raise children, we care for a sick parent. We are very healthy, or sick ourselves. We are believers or atheists. We love women, we love men, or both. With all of our differences, would we have ever met in the real world under other circumstances? Would we ever have spoken together?</p><p>And yet, despite these differences, we have all experienced the same powerful spell, the same rapture, the universal attraction of<em> Carol. Carol </em>is the miracle that brings us together. And here we are, talking together. This conversation could lead anywhere – an email exchange, a meeting in the real world for coffee, a friendship. Who knows? Maybe more for some of us. </p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">To comment or not to comment? That is the question.</span>
</p><p>I have always looked on these hysterical crowds who collectively shiver and cheer their idols in a football stadium or after a concert with a certain condescension. Instinctively, group reactions always scare me a little. As for communicating with an artist I admire, I never would have thought of doing so, whether it was for the sake of not being intrusive, or from the realization of the insignificance of my opinion.</p><p>Yet, over the course of my reading, I began to hear the voices of the authors I was following, not only the voice within their story, but that of their real being. I could hear them in the answers they gave to fans, to readers bold enough to write a comment. I often felt enthusiastic, grateful, and moved by my reading. I needed to express it. I needed to say thank you for the invaluable gift of these texts freely offered, at the cost of solitary and arduous work, in the most total selflessness. This free donation is probably what moves me the most about this fandom.</p><p>However, my heart was pounding at the thought of writing a comment, and I was trembling like a ridiculous teenager in front of a teen pop star. I had become a fan, and I felt the collective shiver when an awaited chapter was posted. I, too, experienced overwhelming emotion and the unbearable frustration of not being able to read immediately when the social situation prevented it.</p><p>Language was a significant obstacle, too. Daring to speak a foreign language is difficult -- there is a milestone to be crossed, an additional difficulty.</p><p>However, at some point the desire to leave a comment was stronger than all these more or less irrational fears. Why not me, after all? My first very short comments in English required a lot of work, a lot of hesitation. Sweating, with a pounding heart and trembling fingers, I finally dared to click on "comment." It was like throwing a bottle into the sea.</p><p>The reaction of the authors to whom I have dared write has been a reward beyond measure. Suddenly, my voice counted, my message was received by the mysterious writer whose talent I admired so much, and they even deigned to respond. I was no longer insignificant, and I gained self-confidence. An exchange began, and a relationship was created.</p><p>It still leaves me speechless that some of these exchanges have resulted in the real encounter of some of "my" authors, and the birth of authentic friendships. <strong><em>Carol</em></strong> offered me this priceless present, in the reassuring and increasingly familiar setting of her fandom.</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">The <em>Carol </em>Literary Circle </span>
</p><p>My best reading experiences on this fandom are a collective adventure. Like all of you, I have developed a habit of reading the comments of other readers. Over time, we get to know the name, the pic, and the tone of the “characters.” We quickly identify the “regulars.” Some become friendly and familiar presences.</p><p>This reading outside of the story has become as addictive as the story itself. I hope the authors forgive me for this admission. Little by little, and I would say specifically since the time of the confinement due to Covid-19, the <strong><em>Carol</em> </strong>fandom has turned into my personal book club. If you allow me this somewhat pretentious comparison, I sometimes have the impression of attending one of those literary salons in my country in the days before the French Revolution. A whole ensemble of aristocrats and literate people gathered at some duchess's house, discussing and sharing witticisms on the last published work. One spoke there, one listened, one could discuss or even argue, but with the same common passion for beautiful texts, gracefully and respectfully.</p><p>As in one of those salons of old-time, I feel myself among my own in the midst of you, dear fellow readers. Our common worship for <strong><em>Carol</em></strong> and our passion brings us together with the same enthusiasm.</p><p>We do not read in the same way. We bring our own expectations, our specific sensitivity, and our unique reactions. Some are very attentive to the story itself, to the interaction between Carol and Therese. They focus more on the ups and downs. Others are more sensitive to the writing, to the tone. Still, others are attached to the construction, to the storytelling. There are those who instantly make the link between the fic and the movie or <em>The Price of Salt</em>. Some leave very short comments, words of encouragement, or humor. Others (including me, I admit) get caught up in the commentary game, or simply indulge in the enthusiasm of their reading and sometimes write comments "longer than the chapter itself." I know, I know…</p><p>I love all of it. I read with delight these spontaneous reactions, and each time my reading of the chapter is refreshed and illuminated. One of them mentions a point that also impressed me, and it comforts me in my analysis. The other emphasizes a detail that had escaped me and suddenly makes me see things from a different perspective. There is not a single reading, but a thousand readings and a thousand interpretations.</p><p>The authors must sometimes be surprised to see parts of their story revealed that they were unaware of at the time of writing. A work always escapes its creator at some point: it sometimes happens that the reader's interpretation shows the writer herself a dimension that she was not aware of having brought.</p><p>Participating in these exchanges is deeply stimulating, but it also begins to permeate our individual reading experience, collectively making us more attentive and demanding readers. If we read alone, each on our own, the moment of sharing links us to a community. If reading needs contemplation and silence, far from isolating us, it deeply connects us to the world and to the wonderful readers of this fandom.</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">The Mad Journey of a Comment Section</span>
</p><p>Such is our book club, although sometimes this literary salon tends to look like a saloon, literally, as it has recently in <em>Fire, Water, and Rock</em>. </p><p>Commenting on Pentimento's chapters is one of my great pleasures in life. Those pleasures are as rare as the passing of a comet: such events do not happen every year. In the spring of 2020, during confinement, comet Pentimento passed again in the sky of AO3. I was there.</p><p>The comments section quickly filled up with comments left by regulars. Comet Pentimento is very popular among Carol lovers; this is her third visit to our Milky Way. Thanks to word of mouth, readers crowd to attend the show. In this time of pandemic, we doubtless need even more to contemplate the ballet of these beautiful celestial and sparkling bodies in our sky above.</p><p>Dazzled, I was overjoyed to read the chapters she graciously posts so that her “old continent” readers can enjoy them at breakfast time. I would then comment without restraint, and I would read with overflowing good humor the comments of other readers. They were anything but normal, actually.</p><p>What happened to cause the comments section to suddenly spiral out of control at some point in May? And to cause me, a quiet person filled with dignity and seriousness, to take part in this frantic bacchanal? Should we see this as an ultimate consequence of confinement?</p><p>The comment wall suddenly morphed into a classroom full of unruly kids. P is a great writer, but as a teacher, I must say she has no future because she has no authority. Imagine that at one point, one, then two, then three, then all the students – I mean the readers - started to fidget, heckle, and climb over the tables. P watched all this commotion with an indulgent, amused look. We cannot fault her for lack of humor, nor patience. But it is clear, as I write these words, that this messy place now has a life of its own. Pentimento let a monster come alive. I confess, I am part of it.</p><p>If you happen to read <em>Fire, Water, and Rock</em>, be prepared to read two stories in one. The first one, quite fascinating, is a rewrite of <em>Carol</em>, transposed in a state park. Carol is a park ranger and Therese is a geologist. This one is written by Pentimento. Just go read this wonder right now!</p><p>The second one is a sort of metatext difficult to summarize, made up of comments but also of parallel fictions, or over-fictions. Readers organized a punitive expedition to capture troublesome characters. This expedition has become a road trip, a collective psychotherapy, a giant Clue game, an absurd and hilarious party. Richard, Abby, and even Mr. President were deliberately locked in the trunk of a Blue limo. Readers developed a fascination with caves and other crevices. Some went through a traumatic tent experience. Each chapter gives rise to endless discussions and re-readings in order to identify a mysterious arsonist who seems to be the key to the story. The wildest hypotheses are proposed. This second “story” is written collectively by the readers.</p><p>The study of this supernatural phenomenon and its literary classification will undoubtedly be the subject of research in the future.</p><p>Dear P, you left the pencils and the colors on the desk. You let us climb the tables and happily color the walls. We gave free rein to our imagination and our fantasy. This sweet collective madness has been the best antidote ever offered to the insanity of our current time.</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">Narrative Proliferation</span>
</p><p>Narrative embeddedness (scholarly hat!) has been around since human beings began to tell stories. An initial narrative serves as a framework for other narratives nested within. In the <em>Odyssey,</em> in the <em>Thousand and One Nights</em>, in so many heritage works we have experienced the pleasure of sliding from one level of story to another, following the author's intentions.</p><p>Reading a fic in this fandom often gives rise to this kind of experience, but the adventure is much more unexpected because the embedded narratives never depend on the original author. The fic initiates comments, which sometimes themselves become stories within the story. I will never cease to be amazed by how much the authors' tales elicit confidences and personal sharing. Protected by anonymity, readers correlate parts of the work to their own lives. They share their own experiences, or they find an expression of their experiences through the words of the author. They dare to <em>write their own story.</em> Thus <em>Carol</em>, the original story, is rewritten by the talented authors of the fandom, who themselves offer the reader the possibility of telling their own personal stories. <em>Carol</em> is a matryoshka containing within herself so many smaller and smaller endless replicas uncovered and uncovered again. She is mirrored to infinity in the stories of this fandom, mirrors themselves of our own lives, our journeys, our wounds, our loves, our losses. It allows the reader to find coherence in her own life, to keep it at a distance by telling pieces of it. This is how, while reading a story, I often read a thousand other stories.</p><p>Isn’t turning our own small lives into a story an attempt to give shape and meaning to our destinies, so fragile and ephemeral in the tremendous roar of the universe?</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">A sacred ritual</span>
</p><p>In this uncharted land made of people, I meet not only a writer but readers who are to me another kind of writer. I travel through the shared experiences of others. Reading has become a precious moment. In the icy night that our world seems to be lately, we come together around a story, a fire that lights up, warms, and gathers. Each comes with nothing but her heart, each has her place, each can speak in her turn.</p><p>Our communion begins, a sacred ritual from the dawn of time, which pushes back darkness and loneliness. Reading fics together distracts us from a daily life that has become for some very difficult to bear. Romances featuring Carol and Therese also allow us to still believe in the nobility and grandeur of feelings, when some of our societies seem to have lost their founding values. We find all this around our great common fire. Some personal stories are also shared, which are absolutely heartbreaking; they bring me back to myself every time and remind me how much I have been spoiled by life.</p><p>But there is an even more sacred and mysterious stage: we gather around fics whose painful stories reflect our own fears, our sorrows, our losses, our irremediable weaknesses. Carol is an alcoholic, or Therese self-harms, they cheat on each other, hurt each other, tear each other apart, leave each other. It's painful, it's unbearable, it's ... cathartic. Together we are reliving the powerful mystery of the great ancient tragedies. And somehow, with a heart filled with pity and dread, but relieved and purified, we leave the virtual place of our joint ritual.</p><p>I had never realized, before the pandemic, that I could be part of such a community. Suddenly borders are closing, we can no longer travel, sometimes we cannot leave our homes, we can no longer see our loved ones. The world narrows. Yet, during all this suspended time from confinement, nothing has ever prevented us from finding our common fire. <em>Carol</em> is our landmark in a world that seems to have lost its way.</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">Opening my Eyes</span>
</p><p>I will never cease to be amazed by the power of art and its impact on us if only we are able to immerse ourselves in it. <em>Carol </em>mirrored my own image, I said it, but it was by no means a narcissistic experience. She brought me here, to this land full of beautiful souls, and she opened my eyes to what I had never really looked at.</p><p>After a few weeks on AO3, I started to feel uncomfortable: I felt like an outsider and even an impostor. I had joined a tribe that was not meant to be mine. I was straight, that's understood. But all of the writers and readers appeared to be lesbians. I felt like I had appropriated a work of art that didn't belong to me, that wasn't meant to tell me about myself. And yet -- <em>Carol </em>had talked to my soul. I also found these same universal values in the fics that I was now reading. The themes in them touched me, the straight white bourgeois. Why did <em>Carol</em> seem like the jealously guarded icon of the lesbian community?</p><p>In my “before <em>Carol</em> life,” I was different. In no way did I ignore the existence of lesbians and gays. I have a gay brother and relatives, gay and lesbian friends and coworkers. I live in France, a country where everything is certainly not perfect, but where gays and lesbians have acquired, thank God, a certain visibility in society. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2013, certainly at the cost of a passionate political and societal debate, but ultimately with the support of a very large part of French society. I was gay friendly, and probably very satisfied with myself. I had a good conscience. But I was not aware that there was a gay or lesbian culture, and that specific works or people could be emblematic for them.  In my “before <em>Carol</em> life,” I didn't understand anything.</p><p>In my “after <em>Carol</em> life”, I read SimplySally’s fic, <em>Better Than Fiction</em>, and SimplySally became my friend. I was at last confident enough to talk about this topic with her. We had the intimacy afforded to us by our initial anonymity. To be a lesbian, she told me, is to be almost invisible since the dawn of time. So as not to draw attention to yourself, to blend into the background, in a world where heterosexuality is the norm. You see, she added, when you're a lesbian, when you understand that you prefer girls, you look around to see if you can find models to identify with. And you don't see anything. Lesbians in the cinema? They always end badly. They kill themselves, or they turn straight, or they go crazy. When the world does not reflect any image of you, it is a deep loneliness to live in. And then one day you read a work like <em>The Price of Salt</em>. Or see a film like <em>Carol</em>. Suddenly, you are not alone anymore.</p><p>Oh, my dearest friend, the impact of your words on me, how can I describe it? I was, I am still, upset, shaken to the depths of my soul, not to have understood it before knowing you. I am "on the right side" by the pure chance of my life. I never had to look for images of myself to reassure me. They are everywhere, they surround me. I live in the West, in a white and heteronormous world. What a knockdown!</p><p>I, who believed that <em>Carol </em>first delivered the universal message that I claimed to see in it - because we always find in a work what we have first projected into it - now realized that I had lived in the comfort of my blindness, in an unconscious as well as inexcusable indifference. Carol and Therese offer lesbians so much more than they will ever offer me: a positive, normal, and beautiful image, the hope of a possible life together, the possibility of assuming that one is finally without fear, to live and to breathe again. When someone who is dear to you explains this with these obvious words, then everything that concerns her begins to concern you, all the time, and everywhere. And this is where the supreme power of art resides: its vital necessity for our societies and our individual lives. <em>Carol</em> taught me empathy when she made me aware of the lesbian condition. I finally understood, I mean with my heart and no longer just with my brain, what it means to belong to a minority, and therefore to any minority. She has hopefully made me a little better.</p><p>In a dehumanized world where some of our democracies are dying for lack of empathy, I am offered here the ultimate message of humanity.</p><p>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------</p><p> </p><p>My dear fellow readers, there is an endlessly renewed pleasure in meeting you. Our exchanges are warm and friendly, challenging, hilarious. There is such benevolence in them that you could almost make me optimistic about human nature. And when I leave our so convivial <em>Carol</em> Literary Circle, I am always astonished to find the crude dryness of reality.</p><p>I cooked a Flemish carbonade for Odeon and her family. We ate it at my kitchen table. This is authentic. This is historical. My husband and I have been served a Thanksgiving dinner, in the middle of August, at SimplySally and her wife's place. Another historic event. Someday I'll go drink the delicious coffee that Win is brewing somewhere in Las Vegas. I'll get another one from Casper's, in a special Carol mug. I can't wait, although Casper's coconut mocha scares me a little. As I am French, and so well-mannered, I will drink it politely. I will be so impressed to have a coffee with a friendly ghost. And of course, I don't forget that I have scrambled eggs to cook for Pentimento. She's been reminding me of that for four years now. Well, a promise is a promise.</p><p>It was Carol who made these virtual or real encounters, these real friendships, possible. Our most beautiful trips are made up of encounters.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Available, perceptive, precise, challenging, brilliant, generous: such are my two editors. SimplySally and Pentimento, you are precious to me. &lt;3</p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. No Other Love</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Here is the end of my little travelogue. The personal nature of this chapter made it less of a struggle to write, but perhaps the most difficult to post.<br/>I would like to say how amazing I found this writing experience. I cannot thank SimplySally and Pentimento enough for believing in me and supporting me in editing these chapters. Their advice is invaluable and always so right. Being edited by you is an honor, I keep you in my heart, dear girls.<br/>As for you, dear fellow readers, you are in my heart too. Thank you for your beautiful comments, for sharing your experiences, and for your digital friendship. I had amazing encounters through this work. It has been a constant encouragement to someone like me who spends her lifetime doubting herself. I will miss you.<br/>Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Take care of you. It's not always good to live these days, the world is showing a troubling and sick face, and I don't necessarily mean just this virus. Maybe there is something more ominous in the air. I hope we can all continue to find comfort and hope as we read the wonderful fics of this fandom together.<br/>Until next time, in the comment section, or maybe in another essay. Stay safe. French &lt;3<br/> </p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>
  <em>It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.</em>
</p><p>Patricia Highsmith, <em>The Price of Salt</em></p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Dear Reader, we are still in the forest dark. I still have your hand. (…)</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Trust in me, Reader. We will take the road together.</em>
</p><p>Oberon2016, <em>Carol of the Woods</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">The Guardian of the Sanctuary</span>
</p><p> </p><p>It’s an early Saturday morning in Vegas, and the hills are hopelessly dry. Puny green trees stand out on the yellow earth under a mercilessly blue sky. A wide-awake woman returns home: she has just played a round of golf at dawn, before the desert heat gets too stifling. Bogie, her dog, has taken his morning walk. It's time for a good coffee and a little cigarette. She sits comfortably, the dog at her feet. In a while, she will take a shower and a nap. Her phone vibrates, announcing a notification. </p><p> </p><p>"Damn!” she exclaims, checking the screen, “Pentimento just posted her last chapter!"</p><p> </p><p>With a small twinge in her heart, because it's always sad to come to the end of a story that she has loved reading, she hovers over the link. Her gaze meets Cate's, pictured on her shelf. Cate winks at her.</p><p> </p><p>“I know,” the woman answers, “It’s time to download the full text of Fire, Water, and Rock. I hope there is enough room in the white binder for the pages.” Winking a second time, Cate approves.</p><p> </p><p>"Ok,” the woman says with a sigh, “here we go."</p><p> </p><p>After one last puff of her cigarette, she settles in her armchair. Sipping her coffee, she opens the last chapter on her computer screen." At least we'll finally find out who this fucking arsonist is," she says to a gently slumbering Bogie.</p><p>On the shelf, imperial and mischievous, Cate keeps smiling.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>This is how I imagine a very special person whose invisible and selfless role is nevertheless essential: the fandom librarian and archivist. Authors or readers, you must all know this familiar figure by now. I am speaking of the famous Win.</p><p>For several years, inspired by her love for Carol, Win has taken a wise initiative: she systematically downloads the stories she loves when they are finished. This simple gesture makes it possible to save from nothingness stories that some authors have chosen to remove or delete.</p><p>Like all of us, Win particularly enjoys rereading certain fics. We all have our favorites in our virtual library. Win decided that hers had to materialize, so she printed a number of stories to have a paper version. Perhaps some of you will consider it old-fashioned. Not me. Giving these stories the support of paper means giving them access to a real, tangible existence. In a way, she is making books out of them. Each story is placed in a colored binder. Each color corresponds to an author. Two shelves are already filled with multicolored binders with the name of famous authors of this fandom. Win is the archivist of this library, and she carefully watches over these treasures.</p><p>Prince_Hel occupies two large binders, Oberon two pink ones, Pentimento a white one, Soundtracker an orange, Towanda a red ... and on, and on ... Are you in need of some information? Win browses her library at lightning speed and gives you the answer regardless of the time zone. Does an author have any doubts about something she has used in previous chapters? Win checks and responds instantly. An archivist knows exactly what she has in her library. She gets straight to the point when she searches. She always finds everything. Win is the living memory of this virtual place.</p><p>Somewhere in a corner of Nevada, even if the great authors of this fandom are unaware, their stories have become matter. <em>Scripta manent</em>. I always wonder about the digital memory that stores our data and everything from our life down to the most intimate details. What is the future of our dematerialized beings? By printing the fandom's stories on paper, Win reminds us that a book is a story that we make our own, that we appropriate by touch as much as by sight. We browse and caress its pages. We breathe in the scent of paper and ink. We can annotate the pages, wet them with our tears, wear them out while we are going through them incessantly, or even sleep with them. Reading can still be a sensual, intimate, and loving moment.</p><p>If Carol is the goddess we all worship feverishly, Win is her priestess: she ensures the sustainability of her heritage and its possible transmission. She is the living memory of the Carol fandom. Dear beloved authors, you wrote stories.  Win makes them books. She is your best reader ever.</p><p> </p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">Meanwhile, Across the Ocean…</span>
</p><p>Here I am at the end of this little adventure, insignificant in the eyes of the world, but unforgettable to me. My brain has been functioning in a state of constant hyperactivity for several weeks. It is both exhilarating and exhausting. I was wonderfully supported and challenged by my editors, two beautiful women who are brilliant, selfless, and always available. Together, they could put their talent to good use by organizing masterclasses and writing workshops that would quickly become popular. Just saying…</p><p>SimplySally patiently practiced the ancient Socratic method on me, questioning me to make me bring forth the answers and the material of my chapters. It is very brilliant of her. She would make a much better teacher than I am, I keep telling her. I call this SS technique "the lemon squeezer". Consider your brain is a lemon: she will squeeze it subtly to express the precious liquor. She is also a wonderful psychologist, always available in the event of a creative crisis. She never charges for her consultations.</p><p>Pentimento is an alchemist. She turns lead into gold. She reread all my chapters with scrupulous attention. A wobbly text, a lame sentence, an awkward paragraph? She makes them light, graceful, metamorphosed. She especially knows the art of putting commas and words in the right place, like Mozart knows the right number of notes. How many times have I marveled at reading my corrected chapters and found them beautiful? Often when I read them, I would think: "Damn, this is as beautiful as Pentimento's!" I sent her my ugly ducklings, and she gave me back elegant swans. She does not charge for her services either. She should.</p><p>I went through a multitude of emotional states over the course of a few weeks. My heart has experienced stupendous accelerations. I was enthusiastic when I started my writing. I knew the throes of fear before posting the first chapter - and every one of the others. I trembled with emotion when I received my first comments. I had tears in my eyes when I saw the names of some of my readers. I was overwhelmed by the stories shared in the comments. I have been eagerly awaiting comments from some of you – from all of you. I have doubted the value of my text, the relevance of its content, or the quality of my writing a thousand times. I sweated profusely to make the paragraphs look acceptable. I fought for the translation to faithfully tell what I was expressing in French. I struggled with the original rhythm of the sentences that the English language betrayed. I lost confidence. I lacked inspiration. I thought about stopping everything. I regained my confidence after reading a word of encouragement. I have known - I know - the lasting exhilaration of reading so many wonderful comments. </p><p>I received - immensely -much more than I gave. THIS is priceless.</p><p>I took up a challenge. I managed to carry this little attempt to the end. It is, at my small level, an accomplishment. I won a bet on myself. I am not unhappy with it, but I couldn't have done it without SimplySally and Pentimento. They made it possible.</p><p>And, of course, I would not have succeeded without you, encouraging and loyal fellow readers, whose comments have fed my thoughts and my writing all along.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">A Reader Who Writes</span>
</p><p>
  <em>How difficult it is to write as soon as I start. (...) What am I missing? No doubt I had too much fun with myself, I played too much with my brain, with my sensitivity, and I did not keep enough illusions. Beside me who works, there is too often another me who examines, reasons, criticizes, and always finds everything bad. And then, why seek so much? And what a dangerous game to seek too much!</em>
</p><p>Paul Léautaud, <em>The Literary Journal</em></p><p> </p><p>I am not a storyteller. I may have dreamed of being one, but life opens your eyes. When I was in school, my best grades were in writing, so my teachers encouraged me to go in that direction. I wrote easily. I quickly realized that my chosen field was argumentative writing, not creative. In France, schooling fits you into a mold. I am, no doubt, one of these individuals malleable enough to fit this mold. I say this without the slightest humor, just with disillusioned lucidity. So, I did what I was expected to: I have been a pure product of French school and university, a good student. I was the queen of dissertation and literary analysis. the two high-flying exercises in French literary education. School taught me to read, to think, to analyze, to interpret, and to confront. But school killed all capacity for creation in me. Writing to write, imagining a story, combining words to make a poem: all of this somehow died in me when I was a teenager. I have devoted all my energy to writing about texts, works of authors. The more I immersed myself in their works, the more I convinced myself that I had nothing to say in comparison, and no talent to express it. Everything has been said, I thought. My veneration of great authors prevented me from any possibility of personal expression.   </p><p>Beautiful texts thrill me, they move me, overwhelm me, make me laugh and cry. I love the words and the fabulous associations they can make. I love great stories, heroes and anti-heroes. I like people telling me stories, I like listening to a voice like music. I like to be carried away, transported, torn from myself, from the time and real place I am in. I find all of this in the Carol fandom. I am a reader with all my heart, with all my being, with passion and abandon.  And it is as a reader that I choose to make my own small contribution to this community.</p><p>
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  <span class="u">The Courage to Post  </span>
</p><p>
  <em>In the mirror I look at myself and, however old I am, I consider my mother's child, the child that I am in secret, the child that I will always be.</em>
</p><p>Albert Cohen, <em>Book of my Mother</em> </p><p> </p><p>Writing is undoubtedly considered a strange pastime. For a woman, other creative hobbies are considered more normal:  painting, singing, sewing clothes. (Side note for P: “A woman should never learn to sew, and if she can she shouldn't admit it”, I so agree! But it seems we are in a minority again.)  Women who write are suspicious, perhaps even dangerous. As for those who write fan fiction, what a lack of seriousness, what a childish practice! Enough with your Carol! </p><p>Society judges, family judges. All this pressure is inhibiting and sometimes suffocates very real vocations in the bud. Fortunately, there is the anonymity and kindness of AO3. It encourages risk-taking since an author has little to lose under the anonymity of her pseudonym. It is a fabulous freedom. And… it makes me think of my mother's story.</p><p>She was killed in a car accident at the age of 42. I was 17, my sister 15, and my brother 9. My mother was a biologist, and she worked in a laboratory. But she was also passionate about literature, music, painting, and especially poetry. When we would occasionally surprise her at her workplace during her break, we found her in her white coat, sometimes reading a book, but more often writing in little notebooks. From afar, it looked like poems arranged in stanzas. My mother was a secret writer. But as soon as she noticed us, she would quickly put her notes aside in a box as if we had caught her doing something shameful or forbidden. At least this is what I felt.  I never dared to ask her what she was writing and hiding in this box. As a mother, she could be quite intimidating, almost cold, which blocked in me all attempts to be spontaneous.</p><p>Why didn't she write at home? Why was she hiding it from us? Even more from my father? I still ask myself these questions almost 35 years later, and my questions remain unanswered. I will always wonder. </p><p>This whole story raises many other questions: the weight of her education, the pressure of our social environment (she already had to fight so hard to be able to work!), her relations with my father... But the more haunting question for me is: what happened to her notebooks and texts? After her death, I only remember a chaotic period. My father, who was with her in the car, had been very badly injured. He spent six months in a rehabilitation center. My mother's boss probably gave us back her personal belongings, but I know with absolute certainty that they did not contain a box with her writings. I was very young, I did not dare to ask, and my mother's texts are undoubtedly lost forever.</p><p>She probably never had any reader in her whole life, no friendly review or benevolent criticism of her writing. She wrote alone, secretly, and I will never know what her texts were about. It is an inconsolable grief. I think that, if she had lived, she would have been passionate about the technological world in which we now live, with the availability of the internet. And I am sure that AO3 would have been a wonderful space of expression for her where she could write without fear of being judged, or being reproached for wasting her time in futile or childish activities. At least I like to believe that. I somehow found the courage to write this for her, for everything that the time and her social status prevented her from doing herself.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Writing is nothing per se. Writing is a solitary activity that involves only oneself. Posting on the fandom means daring to expose oneself, daring to talk about oneself, even under the mask of anonymity. It is to confront the judgment of readers, their enthusiasm but also their silence. I am not an author, even after this little experience of the last few weeks. But I have a deep admiration for all of you, authentic authors of this fandom, my amazing storytellers. Your courage impresses me even more now, because I too have known the fear of posting my text. Your humility and modesty move me: you dare to take the risk of posting texts that you are not always satisfied with, perhaps because you ran out of time, or you only had a tiny phone screen on which to tap out your thoughts. Regardless, you post, you take the plunge. Carol continues to feed your inspiration. You create. You share. </p><p> </p><p>And you take us all on the journey with you, into new and yet to be explored territory.</p><p> </p>
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